Many park districts, parks & recreation departments, and community organizations streamline their operations, registration, marketing, and maintenance tasks with the help of software.
The days of spreadsheets, word processing, and an email account getting the job done have long passed. And for a good reason! Software gets designed to make our lives easier. It handles tasks that may be too time-consuming, cumbersome, or even too complicated for us to complete.
Let's look at some types of parks and recreation software to improve the efficiency of teams and operations.
Recreation Management Software
One of the most popular, widely-used software for parks and recreation departments is recreation management software. This software helps with many registration and operations tasks to help with communication and efficiency. The automation and features in this software help reduce paperwork and monotonous tasks.
Also, Recreation management software creates an online space where the public can easily browse, register, and pay online for memberships and recreation programs.
Recreation management software often comes full of features, including:
- Tracking program and event registrations
- Managing program memberships
- Digital, secure payment processing
- Managing facility rentals and reservations
- Report generation and designing
- Assist with facility management
Both small and large parks and recreation departments benefit from recreation management software designed specifically for the public sector.
Sports League Management Software
Some smaller agencies and organizations may not need all the features of recreation management software. They want something more specialized and straightforward to help with one aspect of their operations.
For example, managing sports leagues.
Sports league management software works for both small and large leagues. The software allows league managers to easily organize team assignments, schedules, and stats. It can also send notifications to update teams, coaches, and families about upcoming changes or news.
Sports league management software makes it easy to assemble leagues, divisions, and teams. Depending on the software, players can even go online and look at their stats on a secure portal.
Many recreation management software programs offer league management as part of their features.
Volunteer Managment Software
Volunteers are a vital part of many organizations. Volunteer management software allows the coordinator to easily manage volunteers, track their hours, and alert them about new opportunities.
Volunteers have a place to log in, report hours, check for opportunities, and sign up for them. The most recent volunteer management software is cloud-based, so volunteers and staff can get this information from any web-enabled device.
Like managing leagues, recreation management software may include features for volunteer coordination. You can also use software exclusively meant for managing volunteers.
Customer Relationship Managment (CRM) software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software manages an agency's relationships and interactions with visitors, members, and interested individuals in the community. A CRM helps to automate processes--like sending out a registration confirmation email once someone signed up for a program.
CRMs are also helpful for marketing and letting people know about upcoming events. For example, you can get the email addresses of everyone that signed up for exercise classes and send out a campaign about an upcoming health and wellness fair.
Some CRMs are very complex and have more features than a parks and recreation agency probably needs. Simpler CRMs can still organize, manage, and automate emails and other communication to save time and missed opportunities.
Social Media Management Software
Social media continues to play a role in many successful content marketing strategies. Creating posts, publishing them, and replying to comments on each platform can quickly fill up someone's day.
Social media management software allows you to create, publish, monitor, and manage all social media networks from one dashboard.
Productivity Software
Some of the software standards still hold their own when it comes to completing tasks. Word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software still serve a valuable role in the day-to-day operations of parks and recreation offices. (They just may not be as exciting as some other software.)
Park Maintenance Management Software
Park and facility maintenance can be pretty complicated. With different types of sites, assets, and equipment, keeping track of everything may require additional help.
Computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) allows maintenance teams to have a centralized location for communication, work orders, task management, and reporting. Cloud-based CMMS solutions will enable the maintenance team to report inspections, generate work orders, make notes on a task, and record hours from any web-enabled device.
Maintenance management software also allows directors and stakeholders to analyze data and generate reports about historical labor, labor costs, inspection findings, and more.
There are several CMMS solutions available. When researching, you want to ensure the developers understand the parks and recreation field. By being proactive about the complex needs of our industry, the CMMS is powerful and flexible enough to make it work for your agency.