Growing Champions – connecting athletes & sponsors in BC
February 23rd 2009 | posted by steve
We are excited to announce the new Growing Champions website featuring our custom CMS Admin, newsletter / mailing list management tool, and robust athlete application process management tools!
The CMS system for GC is built on our rock-solid 604cms foundation, offering intuitive, simple control of every area of content on the site. GC can add images, embed video, and manage text content with pre-built styles for headings, sub-headings, etc. Their Feature Story manager allows them to select premier stories that will dynamically appear on the home page, randomly selecting from the list, so visitors see different content each time they visit
The site has multiple areas that auto-populate content, for instance the Sponsors page. This page is populated automatically, when a connection is made between an athlete and sponsor. This lowers management overhead for GC, and provides more dynamic content for the visitor to browse.
I’ll talk about the Athlete Application process in a minute, but first, how athletes are managed for listing.. GC can manage every detail of the Athlete profiles, select feature profiles for showcasing, and quickly activate / de-activate profiles for archiving. (see image below)
For visitors, the website features a custom Athlete Profile search, offering regional, and sport-specific searching. Once visitors are viewing a profile matching their search criteria, the site offers a list of other exact matches, as well as smart-suggestions for Athlete Profiles that match part of their criteria. This exposes more profiles to more visitors, and increases the value of the website.
There is also a powerful site search, that is fully in-line, which auto-indexes the website every night and stores the data for super-quick search results, and indexes all web pages, and even PDFs, Word Docs and more!
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The Athlete Application process management tool was our biggest challenge; it involves passing an Athelete’s application through four steps, each with unique users and unique access levels, while being able to oversee he entire process via Super Admin user. The system automates the process, so applications pass from one user to the next as each completes their role in the process.
Super Admin can check in and see what stage the application is in, and complete any of the steps themselves if desired. Additionally, if a stage was not completed correctly, the Athlete application can be regressed back to a previous stage, while remaining available to the current stage user.
When Athletes apply to be listed, they list the top event highlights in their sporting career, for instance the Summer / Winter Games, PanAm Games, or the Olympics. Based on their data entered the system automatically determines a “score” for an athlete applcication to determine eligeability. This is just another example of how the system lowers management overheaed, and reduces tasks that previously needed to be done manually.
