Registering for town-run recreation programs just got a whole lot easier after the official rollout of Innisfail’s new online registration program earlier this month.
The program, known as Activenet, had been under discussion for over a year, said Shelley Gagnon, manager of community services.
It allows people to browse through a list of the town’s recreational activities, register for them, purchase memberships for the local aquatic centre and reserve town facilities – all with just a few clicks of a computer mouse.
It can be accessed through the town’s website, www.townofinnisfail.com.
Gagnon said funds were set aside in the town’s 2010 budget for the program and it was purchased late last year. Town officials spent February and March setting up Activenet and training employees on its use. It was officially launched on Aug. 15.
“It’s taken us quite a while to get it set up,” Gagnon admitted, noting officials wanted the program’s launch to coincide with one of the town’s recreation seasons. With little time to prepare the new system in time for the spring recreation season town officials decided to roll out Activenet in time for the fall season.
Gagnon said Activenet will allow the town to keep better statistics about facility usage and provide improved access to patron histories. The town always had that documentation but it was written up and then filed away, making the process of looking up information extremely time-consuming, Gagnon said.
“For us to go back and look at how many patrons we had come in or how many memberships we sold or how many people we had in swimming lessons, we’d have to tally it all up manually,” she said. “This obviously makes our life much easier and it should also provide history at the tip of someone’s finger too in terms of what they’ve signed up for, what they’ve been in, what swimming lessons they’ve taken – that sort of thing.”
Customers will now be able to pay for programs using their credit card, which will make registration more convenient for patrons, Gagnon said.
“We’ve never had that before,” she said.
All facility reservation requests will be followed up with a phone call, Gagnon noted.
“For our ice arena, all of our meeting rooms, for our sports fields – everything is on the computer now,” she said. “We don’t have to keep manual Excel spreadsheets that are massive - all of that is done through this system as well.”
The program will be expanded this fall to handle bookings for the town’s new library and could conceivably be updated to handle bookings for the use of Chinook’s Edge School Division facilities once a joint-use agreement between the school board and town is finalized, Gagnon explained.
“This is a program that serves municipalities that are huge so we can grow and this program will help us,” she said. “The capacity in the things we can do as we continue to grow are wonderful.”
