The Wellbridge Sports and Wellness Clubs came to Regpack needing a solution to manage their various summer and year round programs at their clubs.
It was important for them to have a dedicated and secure system that could easily collect family information and sync up payments for the various activities parents registered their children for.
Learn more below about how Suzi, Regional Director of Children’s Programming at Wellbridge New Mexico, has used Regpack to successfully manage their summer and year round program!
What is Wellbridge and what kinds of programs do you offer?
Wellbridge is the corporate umbrella for 19 fitness facilities across the country. My role is the Regional Director of Children’s Programming for New Mexico.
Our Summer BLAST! Camp Program, which runs year round as an after school program as well, is our largest children’s program. Our success, particularly with our summer program, has really been supported and facilitated by Regpack.
What system did you use for registration before signing-up with Regpack?
Wellbridge takes our membership data and security VERY seriously. We wanted to find a system to manage our children’s programming that lived outside of our main membership database, since that has proprietary information for hundreds of thousands of members. Our membership system could not support camp and youth programming registration in the way we wanted, so it was our goal to find a solution that could do this better, and allow us to have separate databases for member security.
Prior to Regpack, we were using paper for the same reason, but knew this wouldn’t cut it and we needed to find a more automated solution, and a solution that was more secure and less time consuming than paper forms.
The time, energy, and dollars we spent to keep those paper forms securely stored and processed no longer made good business sense.
What were you looking for in a camp registration solution?
We were just looking for simplicity. We wanted a system that would allow us to offer as many variations on a theme as possible. Even though we are 19 clubs under one corporate umbrella, we do operate independently and offer different programs and different elements to our programming.
So, what I may incorporate into our project here in New Mexico for my camp program, may be totally different from the needs of the camp program in Florida. It was important to find a software that we could customize and adapt to each individual facility, in addition to being simple enough to understand.
What made Regpack the best choice for your needs?
It was the opportunity to be able to customize and work individually even though we were one larger company. It was the ability to do so at a very reasonable cost. It was also the opportunity to move quickly when we were investigating.
Much of what we do is we think and plan and then think again until it’s time to move and then we need to move quickly. So, it was Regpack’s ability to be able to adapt to all of that for us.
You have lots of different price points for your programs. How do you manage this in Regpack?
We have so many price points! Not just one price for members and then another for non-members, there are sibling discounts and there are a large number of products that all have different price points.
For example, families may register for a full week or for three days There are multiple options and Regpack was able to build all of that into our system, which was essential to us.
Was it important that Regpack allowed you to place your registration on your website?
Actually I didn’t even know you did that until after we onboarded! But I love it!
I love that I can send people directly to our website and then they can just click and register right there, under our brand. We didn’t want our registration platform to feel like another party in the mix.
How is managing payments from parents in the system?
At first, we used our existing club billing system to charge families, but this created extra work on our end.
When we showed our accounting team how easy Regpack made it to not only charge families, but create and auto charge payment plans, that worked! Plus, our families loved the system and the ability to pay easily during registration.
Our first year, we’d have parents complete registration with Regpack, and then right at the end left them hanging to make a call to pay over the phone or request payment a different way. We thought, “how silly is that?” and it was again a matter of wasting time and energy and having to double efforts when really, we could have allowed each registering family just to take care of it themselves.
When we did make the switch to auto-billing, life became so lovely and easy and auto-billing is one of my very favorite things about Regpack!
So Regpack streamlined your processes and makes your job easier. It’s a business tool, not a customer service tool.
Exactly!!!
How has COVID affected your programs, and how you are using Regpack?
One of the beautiful, greatest praise that I have for Regpack and for their designers and developers is how quickly they are able to move to accommodate our needs!
We set up our program for Summer 2020 in January so that we could start to accept our registrations at the beginning of the year. e had our program in place and we were accepting registrations without issue. Everything was wonderful. But then Covid hit and we changed the design of our program just as the world at large changed.
We sent an immediate message to Regpack and said, I’ve got to redo everything, nothing that I have in this program now is going to make sense. So, we had to completely, not only rethink and redesign our camp program, but we had to redesign the process in Regpack. Regpack was able to help do that very, very quickly for us.
Our newest Fall program is about working with the kid’s individual schedules that have been assigned through their teachers in their schools, making sure that they’re on task and online when they’re supposed to be, and breaking out into fun active movement when they’re not.
So when we redesigned our Fall Camp into this full day program under COVID restrictions, I loved that I could add Purchase Protection as an option for families to purchase. Now we’re designing a program that will help our parents in our community to support their children’s virtual learning and they don’t have to worry about getting their money back if they have to cancel due to illness. It’s a no-brainer, I mean it’s a win-win for everyone, for our families and for us.
We were able to successfully run our summer programs without any health issues, and learned a lot! Now during the Fall program, we can move forward knowing that we’ve done this successfully. We know how to run a program while adhering to state restrictions and I think we’re pivoting well! I think we’re at a point where we can provide this service for our members, and for our community, and for our kids and help them throughout this crazy, time.
How do you like working with Regpack’s Support team?
I feel very supported. I do feel like the turn-around time is very quick and most reasonable. You have accommodated an awful lot for us, and I appreciate it. I feel supported and now that I’ve become more comfortable in Regpack and I’ve learned how to navigate the program over time, it makes everything easier.
Would you recommend Regpack to other youth program directors?
I would say that not only has it streamlined our process, but also it’s a secure way to collect and manage registrations.
It is also an amazing marketing tool. Marketing is very important to me. It’s where my career began, so I’m very aware of all the different marketing opportunities out there. The fact that I can communicate so easily to our families through Regpack, that I can send them messages, and stay in touch with them, has proven to build our program very, very quickly. Families are able to send out messages on our behalf as well, and they send to their friends, so these messages are shared and it’s really worked well for us!
For that reason alone, if I had nothing else to brag about, if I had nothing else that pleased me about Regpack, it would be that opportunity to grow our program through the marketing and communication efforts.
