Park County
Nordic Ski Association
- Consultant
The Park County Nordic Ski Association was first established in 1994 to maintain cross country ski trails just minutes from the East Entrance to Yellowstone National Park. By 2019, they decided to seek some technology upgrades. They asked for a new website that would allow them to make payments online. April was able to provide a user friendly system that provided much more, at a low cost. to this growing nonprofit.
- Set up nonprofit membership management system through Wild Apricot; no more spreadsheets.
- Membership, events, and donations payable online and connected to PCNSA QuickBooks account.
- Email newsletters and trail condition updates, and other communication can be seen by any board member and can be tracked for responses.
- Ability to see if event ticket purchasers are members; if not, this new system allows for easy communication to encourage membership.
- Ability to see at a glance how active each member is through event and workshop sign ups.
- Conducted photo shoot at PCNSA event to refresh images and have stock photos for future use.
- Updated organization's Facebook page to reflect content changes and new logo; assisted for a limited time with FB posting to teach PCNSA representatives how to improve their posts. **Facebook is still a very popular platform in Cody for locals to find events and organizations.
- Instagram is very popular in Cody yet many organizations don't post consistently, if they have a presence at all. April set up an Instagram account for PCNSA and made the first few posts, to show the volunteers how it works and how it can be integrated with Facebook. Unfortunately, they have not kept up with posting.
- Name change: Some board members felt the name of the organization should change. I helped the group frame the discussion and sent a survey to all members for their thoughts. This was a challenging discussion for the group and in the end they decided to stay with the current name. It was a valuable experience to help guide them as an outside consultant.
- Website: pcnsawy.org; design options were limited by the Wild Apricot program so it is not a visually stunning site. However, the backend integration with the membership contact database and ability to process payments is the substantial improvement the organization wanted.
- Instagram: instagram/pcnsawy
- Facebook: facebook.com/PCNSA
After launch of the new system, PCNSA's first event sold out in less than one week; this usually took place over a two month period when they used a paper ticket system. Also, all payments were made online with backend data auto-generating QuickBooks entries, Data was also easily tracked to see attendance via members versus potential members. Through the 2020/21 ski season, the volunteers were also able to easily assist eachother through the Wild Apricot system in creating and sending newsletters and trail condition updates to members.