Stanford Alumni Association Events Staffing
Client
The Stanford Alumni Association hosts a variety of events that serve its alumni, current students, and their families including two key annual events: Commencement and Reunion Homecoming. The staff of Alumni Event Services (AES) provide planning, preparation and staffing for these events, which often require between 100 to 300 staff volunteers to sign up for a variety of shifts in support of each event.
Challenge
Improved website infrastructure to facilitate ease of staff volunteering, accuracy in staffing assignments and 100% uptime availability
Stanford Alumni Association's two key events during the year put a heavy load on their existing Events Management web tool, which would sometimes crash the server, leading to anxiety and frustration during peak activity. In addition, they needed better methods for keeping track of staff members' hours, and to have a more robust role based system for administering the site.
Solution
Website refresh with an optimized, light-weight platform to support events staff
After reviewing existing web-based CMS and event management tools, SolutionSet determined that a custom written architecture specifically tailored for the needs of the Stanford Alumni Association would better meet their needs during peak event activity. A cleaner, more simplified user interface was added to the end-user site.
Administrators of the site got a much more robust and refined set of reporting tools, including AJAX forms that improve user experience by giving the ability to export queries to Excel, email staff quickly and easily, and refine the quality of report results. In addition, varying level of site administrators are able to login, view and edit the events and shifts that they are assigned. The ability to search for, and manage staff members' was added, as well as, the ability to create, edit and clone events and shifts within those events.
Results
Established a stable web infrastructure for peak event activity
Improved both admin and end-user experience with simple, clean, consistent user interface
Better administrative ability to find users, and determine staffing hour requirements via reports
Increased number of events that the improved Event Management web tool is used for
Technology Used
_PHP
_MySQL
_AJAX/Javascript
_xHTML
_CSS