An Open Source Software Stack For Youth Sports

I’m proud to be a founder in a new nonprofit youth soccer organization, westsoundsoccer.org. Responsibilities for the website fell to me, so naturally it is powered by WordPress and hosted on Pressable¹.

Things started simply enough- though like many early stage organizations, things also started at breakneck speed and have barely slowed since. We quickly needed a website with a basic lead capture. I bought a domain and launched the single page site with a short introduction and a Jetpack Contact form that routed submissions to my personal email. This worked well enough and bought us some time (maybe two weeks) to do things like:

• Solidify the founders group and recruit board members
• Create a Gmail account to route leads into and respond from
• Register social accounts
• Install MailPoet and cutover forms (from Jetpack to MailPoet)
• Learn how to incorporate a non-profit, write bylaws, file for trademarks, open a bank account, obtain insurance, rent facilities, and a bunch of other fun stuff.

At some point in early December I realized something was missing between MailPoet and Woo. I’ve historically been skeptical CRM software, but I found myself in need of a way to track people- eg: parents who have registered a child for our program- and not just orders.

Enter Jetpack CRM, which integrates with Woo and MailPoet.

So, now our registration system looks like this:

• WordPress
  • MailPoet
    • Our contact list in MailPoet is populated from two sources:
      • directly via “subscribe to our mailing list” forms on the website
      • via WooCommerce orders where we capture purchaser email address and consent to contact
    • MailPoet subscribers (and tags) sync into Jetpack CRM.
  • Woo
    • Adults (aka purchasers) register their children (aka participants) and pay for our programs via Woo.
    • We collect and retain some purchaser information in WooCommerce, but the purchaser and order data also syncs into Jetpack CRM’s “Contact” and “Transaction” objects.
    • We also collect donations via Woo, using Team 51’s Donation plugin which creates a handy Woo product to use for donations.
      • We use Woo’s variable product to offer multiple price-points: standard price, reduced price and zero price. This allows purchasers to easily choose the price that is most appropriate for their family, without needing to apply for scholarships.
      • Woo gave us the flexibility to add a donation Call to Action (CTA) inline with the registration option, allowing purchasers to easily add a donation (separate product) to their cart.
  • Jetpack CRM
    • Participant information collected during registration (Woo checkout) is stored in Jetpack CRMs “Contact” object.
      • This is currently a manual process, but will soon be automated as part of a customized registration/checkout flow.
    • It’s not perfect, but we use Jetpack CRM’s B2B functionality and “Organization” (aka Company) object to represent the relationship between purchasers and participants.
      • We use Contact Status to differentiate between:
        • Lead: an adult we hope to become a Purchaser.
        • Purchaser: someone who has paid us for something, eg: a program registration, a donation, or (in the future) something tangible like a t-shirt.
        • Customer: an other adult Contact (parent/guardian) connected to a Purchaser and a Participant who we want to track and treat as a Customer but is not the Purchaser. Hint, most of the Purchasers in our systems are Moms.
        • Participant: like a purchaser, someone we are delivering our service to, most likely a child.
        • Past-Participant: someone who was previously, but not currently participating in one of our programs, most likely a child.

We went from idea to generating revenue in 59 days.

Our first lead landed in my inbox on Oct 21st, our first MailPoet mailing went out to about 60 people on November 7th, and on December 19th we opened registration for our winter program and received our first Woo orders. By January 1st we had hundreds of contacts in our CRM and on January 8th we had sold-out the inaugural program, which kicks-off on January 30th.

Stay tuned for more posts about operating this system and how it compares to some commercial alternatives, such as TeamSnap, Sports Engine and Sports Connect.

1. Thanks to Matt and all my coworkers at Automattic for building the open-source software stack that powers West Sound Soccer Academy. ↩︎