Helping the back office should be a website design priority, too

The primary focus of website design is the end user – as it should be. From ease of use, to content marketing objectives, to promotional support, website design is best when done with the end user in mind. However, there are incredible online tools that can help streamline logistics of small businesses.

A great example of this is the work we recently did for our long time client, Island Choral Experience. A nonprofit from Mercer Island, WA, Island Choral Experience is one of the premier musical education organizations in the Pacific Northwest. Their mission to provide supportive choirs and performing-arts troupes means they are registering, organizing, and planning performances for several hundred girls each year.

This is no small feat, and it took precious time away from planning performances and coaching their students. That’s why Bombastic suggested Island Choral Experience’s office move away from their manual registration process. For each of their 3 choirs, Island Choral Experience was disseminating PDF forms, collecting them, then manually entering all the information into spreadsheets. While Island Choral hated their current process, they were not sure how they could easily shift to a digital registration process without incurring large expenses with a confusing website platform.

Team Bombastic took the time to carefully explain how a simple addition of the Ninja Forms plugin to their existing WordPress website could streamline their entire registration process. Now, instead of collecting piles of paper at the first rehearsal, all the families complete their forms online and submit payment with a straightforward PayPal button.

After building 15 online forms that perfectly matched the hard copy versions, Team Bombastic reorganized the online registration pages to perfect the user experience. Then, we spent time training Island Choral to show them how to access the information from their website, and download the automatically created registration spreadsheets. They could not have been more happy with the results.

Bombastic Web Design has been a saving grace for the nonprofit business I run.  I wear a lot of hats, and web design/functionality is not one of them.  Amy and her team have been my right hand in terms of keeping our website functional for current families in our program, and attractive and inviting to new people looking for information about our company.   Nonprofits in particular face the dilemma of when to spend money on upgrades to web design and functionality, and Amy has helped me tow that line for the maximum impact with the lowest hit to our budget.  Laura suggested tasteful design updates that modernized the look and flow of the website whilst maintaining a familiar aesthetic in terms of our branding. Bombastic’s pricing is extremely fair and I never hesitate to contact her with a concern or a question since I know she will answer promptly and will only charge me if work needs to be done on her end.
 
This year we upgraded our website to include registration for over 200 families completely online.  I received so many comments from parents that it was so nice to not have to print anything.  The functionality of the website “forced” families to correctly and completely register without errors, which saved me so much time and energy in terms of repairing the common mistakes from the previous registration process.  Amy taught me how to manage the data the forms generated, and it has been as simple as downloading the data into a spreadsheet that I can manipulate as I need.   
 

Heather Burgess, Island Choral Experience Executive Director

Island Choral Experience had been unsure how their members would view the switch to a digital registration system. They were ecstatic with the positive reviews that flooded in:

Just wanted to share that I LOVED the new online forms – so quick and easy – thank you so much for that change!

Just did the forms and did the full payment so we should be good!  It was SO easy!

I love the new website update!  Everything looks so professional but still fun and happy and age appropriate!

At Bombastic, our experience with logistics informs all that we do. That means our websites – as a baseline – contain beautiful branding, SEO-optimized code and are easy to update. But we make sure our clients are not bogged down by logistics and instead can go back to what they love – running their business.