We began working with Dave Hathaway at Kids’ Rock! in 2014. Kids’ Rock! is a Christian after-school program in Oregon. Children meet weekly to study the bible, worship and play!
As you’ll learn in the interview below, when Dave and his wife want to start expanding and offering their program to more schools, they realized they would need an after school program registration software to replace their inefficient paper process, which consisted of the registration form on the back of their flier.
Since moving to Regpack’s after school program registration software, they have been able to offer a much smoother registration process for parents and improve their volunteer management since registration now happens before programs begin and not on the first day when a parent turns in a form.
Learn more about why Dave loves how customizable Regpack is for him and his organization and more about the wonderful work he’s doing with children! Thanks Dave for chatting with us!
Q: Hi Dave! Tell me a little bit about who you are, and what Kids’ Rock is.
Kids’ Rock is a Christian after school program. It started at a school in Beaverton, OR and it was a school that our children went to grade school at. There was a group of parents that started this group. It started informally and we meet at the school in the gym once a week and share a bible message with the kids and pray and worship with them and play some fun games and activities. We try to connect with the kids and share our faith and just try to love on the kids and help them to grow in their faith.
Recently we have organized as a corporation with the intent of reaching other schools with the same program. At this point we’re in 4 schools in the Portland area and continuing to try to reach more schools. Our goal by this calendar year is to be in 10 schools and hope to continue to grow in that way.
Dave, and his wife Kim.
Q: What system were you using for registration before Regpack?
Prior to using Regpack we just had a paper form, so on the back of our flier we had a form that parents can fill out. It’s basically the same information that we have on our online form at this point. It just asks for parent contact information, medical information, that kind of thing.
More recently we developed a screening process for volunteers, which we used a paper form but then we ported that over to the online system, so now we have our volunteer application with Regpack as well.
Q: What wasn’t working with paper that had you looking at after school program registration software options?
The main prompting was to support growth in the organization. There was a number of advantages to having an online system. One is it provides us the ability to basically advertise better. Our flyer just has a link to our website to register. It just makes it easier from an advertising standpoint to route people to an online registration system rather than having a paper form on the back. And it saves us a little bit of money too from printing costs since we can print a one sided flyer.
Another big advantage to having an online registration system is it gives us access to the information for participants, so when parents sign up we have their contact information and so forth. It gives us access to that information for us to be able to communicate with parents and provide updates on the program, soliciting donations and funding, and it just gives us easier access to the parents. With the paper form, each of our individual groups are somewhat autonomous so there’s a leader for each school group and those leaders would have contact information from the paper forms, and we’d have to reach out to them to get that information. That created more work and now we have easier access to that information.
Also, as we advertise the program and send out fliers, our system allows parents to sign up in advance whereas with a paper form, we’d have them bring their form the first time they come, so we wouldn’t have that information until day 1. Now that we’re online, parents can sign up in advance and the advantage for us is part of that signup process we ask the parents if they’re interested in helping with the program and gives us the ability to see which parents are interested in volunteering. That helps us develop and add to the volunteer team.
This also means we don’t have to start out with as big a team. We can then advertise the program with the expectation that some parents will want to help and then fill up that team with parent volunteers. So it really helps us to easily implement the program in more schools because we don’t have to come up with a big volunteer team to implement the program.
Q: Did you consider other after school program registration software besides Regpack? What made Regpack stand out?
When I first started looking at online systems, I did a search for registration software on Google to figure out what was out there. I narrowed it down to 3 or 4 just based on the website descriptions and what would be a good fit. The main things that caused me to go with Regpack, it seemed like the most flexible platform. Other systems were kind of focused on and built for certain type of registration, so they’d say oh well this can be modified or customized to suit your needs. But it sort of felt like that may be true but it seemed like retrofitting and is it really going to look like what we really need or a registration system that is built for something else and tailored for us. With Regpack it seemed more open and not geared towards a particular type of registration but very customizable for our needs.
That was the main selling point. The interface I felt was very simple and appealing for the end user. That was another selling point for me.
Q: How has the customer service that you’ve received from Regpack been?
It’s been good! I have found that the support has always been responsive, they’ve always been consistent when I’ve sent a request, the response time has been quick.
Q: Would you recommend Regpack to another after school program or volunteer organization? Why? What would you tell them?
If I was talking to someone with an organization similar to ours or to something where it wasn’t necessarily mainstream or didn’t fit into a broad category (sports, camps, etc) and I think there are a lot of solutions out there for those organizations.
But for organizations that aren’t typical I would suggest they look at Regpack. My main point that I would make is the same reason we chose Regpack – it’s a very open system, very customizable, if you have something that isn’t typical Regpack will give you the flexibility to make it what you need to make it. It’s got a nice, easy to use, pleasant interface.
Regpack is very easy for the user to configure their own system. It’s very customizable. I myself doesn’t need to know any coding, yet I can really do whatever I need to do with it to set it up and configure it, you know creating forms and I can do pretty much everything myself without needing Regpack to do anything. That’s a big advantage for me. You can create forms and capture whatever information you want.
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