Athletics Victoria: From kitchen table to leading the field with MySport

Keen to stay ahead of the game, Athletics Victoria knew it needed to move on from their old, labour-intensive membership and event system. It was expensive to use and lacked the flexibility they needed to automate processes and effectively manage members, events and communications.

“Our objective was to transition the organisation from a kitchen table sporting club into a professionally run organisation,” says Glenn Turnor, CEO of Athletics Victoria. “To do that, we needed to move away from a paper solution. Accompanying that decision was the realisation there would be a cost reduction to the management process. But, more importantly, it gave us an opportunity to improve our administrative efficiency by turning a number of processes - from our member and club management, to competition and education services – into a great online experience for our members.”

Athletics Victoria partnered with Myriad IT (who are now known as Fusion5 following a merger in 2017) in 2011 to implement MySport, their integrated sports membership and CRM system.

Based on the industry-leading Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, MySport gives sports organisations like Athletics Victoria the means to rapidly deliver and support new services and experiences. It makes organisational decision-making easier, advances the interests of existing members, helps grow membership bases, and manages member communications, events and other activities.

Fusion5 worked closely with Athletics Victoria to tailor MySport to meet their specific needs while providing the flexibility to implement future enhancements.

MySport’s front-end self-service portal is fully integrated into Athletics Victoria’s website. This enables their range of members – from clubs, coaches, individual athletes, schools, volunteers, and media - to update personal information, renew and manage their membership and subscriptions, and register for events and competitions.

The self-service portal significantly reduces the administrative burden on Athletics Victoria staff by removing the need to manage membership activity manually, and decreases the opportunity for error in data entry.

MySport immediately saved Athletics Victoria a substantial amount of time on data entry, and their members have instant access to the latest competition results.  

“We no longer need to duplicate our data entry efforts,” says Turnor. “We enter data once in MySport and it is shared immediately on the website. We believe our competition results portal delivers a better experience than any of the other member associations. MySport freed up valuable resources in a small not-for-profit, so that we can deploy them into other programs and products.”

MySport gives Athletics Victoria unparalleled insight into its membership, by tracking and analysing activity within the system. This also means the organisation can create specific communications based on member types, organisations (e.g. athletics clubs and schools) and events (e.g. competitions and coaches’ seminars).

In addition, MySport gives Athletics Victoria the tools to create, deliver and measure the success of their outreach campaigns with user-friendly reporting capabilities and dashboards, which quickly and easily retrieve and filter data.

Using statistics available from Athletics Victoria’s weekly newsletter enables the organisation to monitor their readership numbers, track interest in specific stories, and identify, follow up and update inaccurate member data.

“Our members are now able to choose which products and services they want to purchase on our website, but, more importantly, by integrating with other online and IT services to populate the website, we deliver a consistent customer experience.”

Glenn Turnor, CEO of Athletics Victoria

In the past, Athletics Victoria staff manually processed payment transactions for membership, subscriptions and competition fees. Now, all transactions are managed by MySport’s interactive payment gateway, which is directly integrated with Athletics Victoria’s website.

MySport’s in-depth reporting capabilities allow Athletics Victoria staff to access accurate real-time payment information at the touch of a button. A snapshot of cashflow is always at hand, greatly simplifying reconciliation.

There are eight Athletics Australia Member Associations, including Athletics Victoria, across Australia’s six states and two territories.

Turnor says that MySport has given Athletics Victoria a head start over the other associations, who have been working on other solutions for the last three years. “While we are happily using MySport, in many cases they’re still reliant on Excel spreadsheets to bridge the gap between their customer facing portals and their competition platform. And in the meantime, we keep on moving forward at a rate of knots.”

“Now Athletics Victoria is easily the leader when it comes to its online technology member experience, thanks to partnering with Fusion5.”

Glenn Turnor, CEO of Athletics Victoria