City of Lakes Loppet
http://www.cityoflakesloppet.com/
The City of Lakes Loppet is the biggest urban ski race in America. Some of my former colleagues are skiers and had been trying to convince me to join them, so I learned to ski and became a volunteer for the race a few years ago. When the opportunity arose to rework their Web site, we volunteered to do it on our own time.
What worked
The site is a huge improvement for the organization. It is fresher and far more attractive. Since we used a content management system, the organizers and volunteers of the race are able to keep it incredibly up to date. We also used CiviCRM to manage volunteer registration, streamlining a large part of the volunteer coordinator’s effort. I was able to work with some former colleagues of mine on this project and it was a real joy to work with a team that worked well together. It’s sometimes easy to forget how much of a difference that makes. (Thanks guys!)
What I’d do differently
We’re still working with the organization on a few other sites, and we’ll come back to this one when it comes closer to race day, but the biggest thing is that we need to put more time into training. The content management system is a great tool, but it’s only useful if we can keep it up to date.
The CiviCRM software continues to mature and we’re hoping to be able to manage the race registrations through our site and cut out the costs of active.com. We’d also like to move the organization into using CiviCRM for all their constituent management.