Sounds Essential partners with tennis non-profit Net Gains Foundation to serve up a winning solution on the Claris FileMaker platform.
How do you unite an international sporting community while serving up the highest levels of personalized attention possible? And how do you achieve this during a global pandemic, when people are more distanced than ever?
For P.J. Simmons, founder of Net Gains Foundation, and Gary Innes, the executive director, the answer was simple: leverage their love for and desire to give back to the community that had given them so much by using the tools at hand. Namely, tennis and Claris FileMaker.
The Game
Drawing on their own personal experiences, both Gary and P.J. recognized the ability of tennis to be an outlet for growth, support and change in a person’s life. Though a latecomer to the sport, P.J. established the foundation to do just that: to harness the power of tennis as a catalyst for lifelong health and wellness, personal and professional growth, character-driven leadership, and cause-oriented service.
Through its Tennis Congress events and other philanthropic initiatives, Net Gains Foundation endeavors to create a nurturing community for all athletes, regardless of age, race, income, skill level, or other factors that prevent them from pursuing tennis as a pastime, a passion, or both.
Providing the right kind of support to help athletes reach their full potential is also a key focus of the foundation. This means meeting the needs of the whole person, not just the tennis player, be that people going through financial hardship, struggling with their mental health, grappling with the challenges to “fit in”, and more. To this end, Net Gains Foundation has provided scholarships for athletes to attend events, joined with the USTA to develop a curriculum for wheelchair athletes—including one who would go on to compete in the 2020 Paralympic Games—and worked tirelessly to match athletes with tennis pros and other professionals that can best facilitate their personal growth.
However, organizing the Tennis Congress events and ensuring each member receives the highest level of personalized education, training, and attention, wasn’t so easy.
The (Data) Set
“We want to embrace our athletes as individuals,” P.J. says. “To do that, we need to get hyper-granular about personalizing the experience.”
That proved just as challenging off the court as it did on. With its ever-growing network of tennis players, coaches, experts, and volunteers, their collaborations with other professional organizations, and the rally of information back and forth to ensure every event was a grand slam, there were just too many balls in the air. Add in the fact that the athletes at the heart of the events couldn’t self-manage their profiles and suddenly even the foundation’s top seeds found themselves amateurs again.
The volunteer time required to organize these events was becoming too much and the foundation needed to find their footing to continue to succeed.
Enter Claris FileMaker and Sounds Essential LLC, who helped citizen developers P.J. and Gary transform the foundation’s existing FileMaker system into the professional tool Net Gains Foundation needed to take their game to the next level.
Access-All
The first challenge was establishing the baseline. Opposing systems meant everyone spent too much time in the no man’s land of information, chasing down data from this spreadsheet or that application. By consolidating all functions of the organization into a single system, events management didn’t break them, players didn’t lob information over their heads, and communications were easier to return. The data structure was reassessed and adjusted to allow for quicker, easier, and more robust expansion and changes as the organization continues to grow.
The second challenge proved more daunting. Democratizing the sport meant more than just bringing players to the game; they needed the chance to come to the net as well. One person handling hundreds of participants’ information was untenable. That workload needed to be offloaded to the individual athletes themselves.
Thus, the system was expanded to let athletes, coaches, event attendees, and all other on-comers the ability to interact with the database. New development using the Claris FileMaker Data API allowed athletes to submit their profile information directly to the database – completely hands-off for the organizers. Similarly, both athletes and coaches could now view their customized schedules for events and get updates without any delay of game. This resulted in fewer queries, less email, and decreased overhead for those running the show.
Handling well over a hundred individual training sessions, seminars, presentations, and more, as well as assigning a similar number of attendees to these sessions demanded automation. The team needed to be presented with the right information to match athletes, coaches, and other volunteers to ensure a successful and enjoyable event for all. They needed to be able to take a list of attendees, choose a session to assign to them to, and be done.
With scheduling managed, the hard work was done, right? Far from it…
Individualized schedules needed to be distributed by email to the attendees, with their own PDF attachment and online link. Copy, paste, and bcc wasn’t going to cut it here so a communication system with merge fields was developed to automate the dissemination of highly customized information from the database to different sets of attendees.
“The advantages that building on the Claris Platform have given us are amazing,” says Gary. “Tasks that took hours are now done in minutes. We have a level of automation and integration that we’ve never had before and the impact on the volunteer time of the organizers has been dramatic, which only leads to better outcomes for future events and the foundation.”
The (Perfect) Match
“While onsite at our most recent event, I needed to perform some database tasks I hadn’t anticipated. I emailed the development team and, less than five minutes later, I got an email back saying the request was complete. That ability to rapidly develop, adjust, and overcome business problems with the Claris Platform is unbelievable. It reaffirms our decision to invest in and trust the platform to run our operations. I’m so looking forward to the next steps in our development cycle. I have so many ideas on what to tackle next.”
The benefits of leveraging the Claris Platform’s robust feature set have been huge, but there is still work to be done. Further integrations with 3rd-party services like Mailchimp are already in the works to dispatch more marketing-oriented communications. FileMaker Go will be deployed for on-site access and nimble management from mobile devices during events. Opportunities to integrate the new Claris Studio to create a review/feedback platform and utilizing WebDirect for online financial management/reporting by coaches are also being explored.
“We are incredibly grateful to our athletes, coaches, staff, volunteers, and the development team at Sounds Essential,” said Gary after the most recent Tennis Congress event. “Without all these people coming together, driving forward in the same direction, the Tennis Congress and Net Gains Foundation would not be achieving the success they are.”
The Claris Platform has been able to handle all that the Net Gains Foundation has thrown at it with ease, lifting the burden of manual work from organizers’ shoulders so they can continue to support those who find meaning in tennis and drive positive impact in so many lives.
Net Gains Foundation: NetGainsFoundation.org
Tennis Congress: TennisCongress.org
