With an anticipated, unprecedented 11,000 youth attendees to the Wesleyan Youth Conference in Charlotte, NC in November 2003, the planning committee required a website that would be the capstone of their marketing and registration efforts. Furthermore, an automated system was required to accept registrations, process payment, and communicate timely information to registrants over time.

 

 

A site that would be visually appealing to young adults was essential as was providing information in three tracks – for the attendees, for youth pastors, and for the parents.  All this was to be done, without redundant data entry.  Contests needed to be run back-to-back, as often as daily, with user profiling for demographic purposes and gather insightful opinions that may affect the conference program itself.  Also, of great importance was event registration and a “my account” area where registration information could be altered by attendees if necessary until the deadline for changes. Registration also included e-commerce functionality – with online payment as an option.  A robust site was required that would be able to efficiently manage tremendous traffic especially during the final month before the event.

 

 

Lance Technologies created a system for Charlotte 2003 based on its groundbreaking content management system – allowing all entered information to be tagged for viewing by pastors, parents, youth, or any combination thereof.  The Charlotte 2003 site was, in essence, a marriage of three sites that looked different based on what information track visitors chose to follow.  The Lance Team took into account viewer demographics and design and user interface principles to design a pleasing site.  On the functional end, registration information was securely displayed for the planning committee’s viewing at any time from anywhere after a secure authentication process.  Online contests could be posted as often as necessary, winners picked randomly or based on certain criteria, and all information gathered into a centralized database for quick viewing.  All financial and user information was able to be queried as necessary and generated reports could be downloaded into Microsoft Word for mail merges, Microsoft Outlook for e-mail merges, or a slew of database and spreadsheet software.