Table of Contents
Episode Summary
Ready for a better way to engage with patrons? Introducing WebTrac App. It offers custom mobile app features specifically for parks and recreation departments without the need for developers to make changes or updates – or a custom app price. Seamless integration means the WebTrac App will always be updated and ready for your patrons to connect. Join Dave Wirtz and Bryan Gillilan for a discussion about, and the RecChat Premier of, the WebTrac App!
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:07
And welcome RecChat everybody. Very exciting RecChat today, in fact, so exciting that I'd like to just set a couple of ground rules for expectations. So we have a very, there's so much that could be talked about during this presentation, we could go for three hours, but we only have half an hour. Today, we're going to have to stay kind of close to that. We are going to be recording questions. So use that little QA Button down at the bottom. If you have any just feedback, you can use the chat. We're recording all of that Dave, and Bryan will get all of those, we will try to answer questions during the session. But we also have kind of a chock full bit of content. Anybody is going to be at the symposium next week, we'll get longer and more intimate look at this WebTrac app. So look forward to that if you will be here. Otherwise, we'll be having some follow up RecChats before too long. So if we don't get to all the questions this time, don't worry, this is not going to be the only time you hear about the WebTrac app. So with all that being said, I'm joined by the esteemed company of Bret Alarcon and our special guests, Dave Writz it's in Bryan Gillilan. Today, how are you guys?
Bryan Gillilan 1:12
Doing well, Zack, thank you.
Dave Writz 1:14
Doing well Zach.
Zach Malloch 1:15
Good. Well, I don't want to waste any more time considering how much we have to get to. So I'll just go ahead and turn it over to you guys.
Dave Writz 1:25
Great, Bryan, I'll let you start. But I'm going to share my Screen teams. So let me know if somebody thumbs up.
Bryan Gillilan 1:32
All good. Thanks, Dave. So we're here today to talk about the WebTrac app, this is something that our teams have been working on, kind of for a while now. And this is kind of coming from a lot of demand we heard from the market around, wanting to be able to engage their patrons in more effective ways and go with their patrons everywhere their patrons are so really kind of bring in parks and recreations to the palm and, and pockets of all of your patrons, everyone in your community. So with that we've been working really hard to and we're excited to kind of show you guys where we're at with the WebTrac app today. So a key component of the WebTrac app is it is a white labeled app built on an existing app platform. So you as a client will be able to brand the app to match your brand 100% to have it seamlessly integrate with your municipal website to have it integrate seamlessly with WebTrac. And really have everything be a seamless single experience for your patrons and an app in their pocket all the time with them everywhere they go. accessible through a single touch on their mobile device. Dave, anything you want to add on the branding side of things?
Dave Writz 2:42
No, I think you nailed it, Bryan, it's gonna be your content your way.
Bryan Gillilan 2:48
So when we talk about your content, and the content that you're going to be able to deliver to your patrons through the app, you know, anything your patrons can do on WebTrac. Today, they're going to be able to do through the app. With the big difference being you're going to be able to completely control the patrons user journey and how they discover your content in the app. So whether it's program registrations, facility, reservations, you know, finding out about events, seeing schedules, getting just updated news, etc. From your organization, you're going to be able to put all of that content in your app, and you're going to be able to do it all self service. Go ahead, Dave will continue kind of moving through here to try to keep some momentum. So you know, one of the things the app is going to deliver to every client out there is kind of a more streamlined sales process. Again, all those things you can do on WebTrac, you can do through the app, and you can really control that user journey. So we'll touch on this a little bit as we open up the app and do some demonstrations. But you'll be able to really drive people right to the booking space for a specific facility or drive them right into purchasing a membership through a bunch of different means and avenues. And really be able to streamline that purchase process to reduce the number of touches the number of clicks and really ease the process for a patron to find what they're looking for and kind of get that conversion and get them participating in your programs. A huge proponent or component of the app is it's not just WebTrac it is linked to any content anywhere available on the web on directly through the app. So whether that's your own municipal website, whether that's some third party content, whether you've got some promotion, you want to get out there to all your your customer base, all your community, you're going to be able to embed all of that seamlessly into the app through some really intuitive and simple content management tools. So bringing all of Parks and Recreation together under the WebTrac app as opposed to having WebTrac website, etc. You'll be able to bring all that together on the app. And then I think the last kind of key important piece of your cave so why Did we do an app? Why isn't this just mobile WebTrac Obviously, the app has a lot of, you know, kind of functionality that is available at one touch. So why an app, you know, we're gonna have some enhanced membership display options. So for those folks that have rec centers, folks need to come check in, you may print key fobs. Today, you may have ID cards today. Today, everybody expects to have their ID right on their phone on their mobile device. With the WebTrac app, they will at one touch of the app, they'll be able to pull up their membership barcode and scan in some exciting things were that we think are really kind of game changers in the space, the ability to send push notifications to your your community. So whether that's emergency alerts, or targeted communications to subsets of your community, about upcoming events, or scheduled notifications that you want to kind of stage for the future, you're going to be able to do all that and more right through the WebTrac app. And all of that obviously, coming along with what you would expect out of any native mobile app is kind of metrics on how the app is landing within your community kind of engagement with the app, app downloads, all that information all available to you from an app dashboard, that kind of gives you all those insights into how effective you are at communicating with your community.
Dave Writz 6:21
Great, Bryan, I'm gonna move to the next page. Talk a little bit how we're delivering it. Yeah,
Bryan Gillilan 6:25
yeah. So this is a real key component for Vermont systems, as we kind of delved into the concept of delivering a mobile app to market and a native mobile app, they're kind of faced with two options to kind of Build everything in house or try to leverage an existing kind of tried and true app platform for delivering an app to the market. And through our kind of sister companies. Within the Vermont systems family, were able to partner with an app platform that is an industry leader in the recreation health and fitness space already. So kind of some high level metrics here with the platform, the WebTrac app is built on over 20 100 sites leveraging the app, over three and a half million monthly active users of the apps in the various app stores. So again, 600 plus white labeled apps built on this app platform already in existence in the app stores today. And on average, over 45 million push notifications being sent through this app platform per month. So really effective means of getting out and communicating with communities already built into the app platform that we were leveraging to deliver the WebTrac app.
Dave Writz 7:37
Yeah, the only thing I'd add, Brian is, it's a really established tool that does provide significant functionality that don't want to put you in a bad spot, Bryan is on the development side, that would have taken us a long time to get there, I'll put it that way. And I'm really excited about what the partner brings to us and to you, the consumer, our customer.
Bryan Gillilan 8:03
Alright, so we'll touch on this, we're going to actually get in and demonstrate some of this stuff. So we're trying to kind of get through some of this relatively quickly. But one really key component of a mobile app and bringing it to market for us was putting the power of managing the app content in the hands of our customers. And so kind of priority number one, there was a no code solution. We don't want anybody didn't have to know how to write JavaScript or HTML, we don't want anybody to have to deal with submitting apps to the app store for approval. All of those little components that go along with maintaining a native mobile app, are super expensive to do on your own and really costly and involve a lot of third party help, typically. So we wanted to be able to deliver all of that in house through Vermont systems, and have us take on the burden of doing all those apps submissions and working with you through that and kind of helping you maintain your app. And so the kind of platform that we're delivering on is a true no code solution to managing the design of your app. So when it comes to putting new design elements onto an app page, to finding your sub navigation, the cockpit as you'll come to learn it as is kind of the one stop shop for your marketing team or your rec admin to be able to manage the entire app experience for your patrons and make real time updates to that app experience on the fly as needed. And again, we're going to touch on some of this with a little Demo here in a moment.
Dave Writz 9:40
Sorry, Bryan, it's thinking.
Bryan Gillilan 9:43
Alright, so this is the part of the presentation where we've got some bullet points here. I'm just going to ask Dave to jump into the app. And we'll we'll start playing around so folks can actually see what the app is capable of and what we're going to be able to do here. So the first thing to call out in the As as Dave loads it up on the Screen here is, again, you have complete control of your design your brand as part of the app onboarding process, you know, our team at Vermont systems will be able to engage with you all directly as part of the onboarding process, work with your marketing team to come up with the app design that works for you. You'll be able to implement that yourself with your marketing team through the app cockpit. If you're a client that maybe doesn't have a dedicated marketing staff and needs a little services help from Vermont systems to execute your design, we're more than happy to help play that role as well with you and help you kind of reached that initial design state for your app and then hand over the keys to you to kind of maintain it moving forward. Go ahead, Zack sounds like maybe we got a question.
Zach Malloch 10:45
Yeah, specifically about push notifications. Cyrus was curious if this will integrate with Rec connect, or if there's a way to target specific people like maybe participants in one activity that's getting cancelled for the evening. Can we push just to them? Where does it go to everybody that has the app?
Bryan Gillilan 11:00
Yeah, it's a great question. And the answer is, absolutely, we're going to be able to do that. So one of the things our development team is working on right now as I speak is the kind of RecConnect integration aspect of push notifications. So when it comes to push notifications, you'll have the ability to send kind of real time ad hoc push notifications, if there's some emergency alert, or some promotion you want to send out to everyone that has the app, you'll be able to do that real time right through the app cockpit, you'll be able to schedule, push notifications to customer segments. So the way push notifications are designed in the app space is you get to define what your customer kind of segments or categories are within the app, you then send push notifications through those categories through those segments. So maybe you've got a news segment, maybe you've got a golf segment, maybe you got an aquatic segment, whatever the case is, you get to define what those are. And you send your push notifications through those channels. And then your your community will be able to on their app, kind of choose which channels they want to kind of turn off, if you will, they'll kind of have them all on by default. But if they're seeing a bunch of aquatics push notifications, and they don't ever engage with aquatics thing kind of turn off the push notifications for aquatics for themselves for their app, have some of that control on their own. But they'll always be able to access those messages through the app, they'll just stop receiving kind of the in your face push notification, if you will, if they opt to turn it off. When it comes to the rec connect integration piece. That's where we're going to be able to from a set of rec connect results be able to choose a push notification through the app as an output option of your rec connect and have it target that first. So we know push notifications are by far the best way to reach your patrons in terms of engagement and open rates. So we'll be able to do that send that push notification to just folks in a specific class because classes canceled, whatever the case may be, we'll be able to target that subset. And so long as they have the app downloaded, they'll receive that push notification.
Zach Malloch 13:05
Thank you for that, we did have a couple of things pop up in q&a one's a little bit more of a feature request. So I'll just let you look at that and see if you want to talk about it online or just put that in the hopper. And then Kim was just requesting if we get a chance to show off the campground campground and Service Item piece of it. That's where she would specifically like it. Although Kim, I think you're going to be here next week. So you could maybe get to see some of that next week if we can't do it today.
Bryan Gillilan 13:31
Yeah, I think So Dave's got our Demo site. So this is just another example of another brand you might have on your app. Again, he's going to be able to kind of jump back and forth between brands here to show some other ones if you guys wanted to see like some other actual branded clients, potential app, you know, what their brand could look like in the Parks and Rec space. We've got some examples here as well, where you can kind of see what those app brands look like. A lot of our kind of defaults here, obviously, you'll notice share a similar style in terms of the tiling, and so on. But one of the cool things about the cockpit is it really is an intuitive modern kind of content management system where you're able to add layout components to your app and kind of choose what layout design you want. So we'll we won't spend a lot of time here in the Demo, because we're short on time. But if Dave were to Click like the plus icon at the very bottom of his app preview here, you'll see that as you add content to your app pages, you get to choose kind of element layouts, whether they're single, you know, Banner, multi banner, grid style, whatever the case may be, you're gonna get kind of choose what app tiles you want to add, and then link images to those right through the cockpit directly and have that update real time right in the application.
Dave Writz 14:48
So do you want to show a quick example Bryan of changing the app?
Bryan Gillilan 14:53
Yeah. So for example, if if we didn't want or wanted to change the kind of WebTrac app a brand here we have at the top of the Screen, let's just say we wanted to hide that for the time being, it's as simple as clicking on that little banner element, Dave can select that choose to make it invisible in this case and save it. And when he does that, if he refreshes his app,
Dave Writz 15:16
I'll be getting back to the right app environment to show it, Bryan,
Bryan Gillilan 15:23
this is all going to be kind of real time update from the cockpit. So by the time they've loaded, that, obviously, we can see it's gone. It's not let's go
Dave Writz 15:30
back, let's go back, Bryan and pull it back up. So we see that direction. So now we're here, let's make it visible.
Bryan Gillilan 15:37
While Dave's making that visible, let's say you decided for whatever reason, it would be a better user experience, if activities was the top tile, you can quickly grab that, tell it he wants it to move up above those other tiles from a layout standpoint, make that quick change, save that. And now if we go refresh the app, that's all real time updated, just like that. And we're going to be able to see that reload activities popped to the top WebTrac app back in there. So full capability there. Now that's talking about kind of content management a little bit which, you know, the cool thing about the app platform is that you're gonna be able to kind of hand that functionality right off to your marketing team, give them access to the cockpit, and they'll be able to kind of define your navigation space. So we talk about navigation, a really cool component of the app. And a really game changing component of the app is you get to define how your customers discover your programs. So you may be a heavy splash page user today and do some definition of how customers get to their components. But you may rely really heavily on activity search on WebTrac. For example, well, if you wanted to go a layer deeper, and not have customers have to do so much searching and filtering there, you can really quickly and easily create sub navigations in the app that let you drill into your program. So if Dave were to say like I need to register for a youth basketball program, okay, it's going to be an activity, he's going to be able to jump in. And we've created kind of a navigation path in the app that makes it really intuitive and easy for him to find that particular thing. He's after he can jump into the youth activities. Hey, here's all our different types of programs, we offer, oh, youth basketballs right there. And all through a really intuitive simple mobile interface. Dave's gonna get drilled into now WebTrac. And our test environment, here's a little slow, so bear with us. But he's getting drilled right into WebTrac. And to a WebTrac search results specifically for youth basketball. And from here, he can go ahead and register. And he is really in WebTrac at this point within the app embedded within the app. So from a payment processor standpoint, from a PCI standpoint, this is all flowing through WebTrac. So there's nothing new to add to your system. There. It is WebTrac proper. So I can do anything I can do in WebTrac, right through the app through that purchase process. The other key component to this that we haven't really talked about is the app is going to be leveraging a single sign on to WebTrac. So your patrons will not have to remember another login another thing, they won't have to log into the app every time they open it. They will provide app credentials one time that are their WebTrac credentials. And forevermore when they launched the app on that device unless they explicitly choose to kind of log out of the app, if you will, they will be logged in as themselves and not have to go through that painstaking login process. So single sign on will take place behind the scenes. So when I launched this app, and I want to present my barcode to check into the Rec Center, it's just launched the app, hit the memberships and passes and bang, there's my membership barcode right there, and potentially access to the other members in my households, barcodes, if need be. So there's a pretty tight integration here. Those of you that kind of watched our member based WebTrac Login RecChat recently, one of the impetus for that change was to support this ability to have a native mobile app where my login is specific to me as a member. So when I do things like go to memberships and passes, it's just me, just me. I can get to my other family members, but it knows who I am specifically. I think I saw a question come in in the chat, you know, will this be a kind of default app in the App Store? Will it be available in the Google and Apple app stores? And the answer is it's going to be your own white labeled app in the App Store. So it will be in both the Google and Apple stores and it will have your branding, your styling your app icon that you want to use
Dave Writz 18:08
it's your descriptions your screenshots all it's yours completely. It won't save Vermont systems anywhere on it.
Bryan Gillilan 19:55
And we mentioned push notifications a little bit Dave's kind of just sharing his Screen so you don't you didn't actually see the push notification pop up like you would have on a phone. But you do see up in his top right there, he's got a little badge that he did just receive a push notification a moment ago, if he jumps into that in the app, we'll be able to kind of see, hey, there's a new push notification that came through the news channel. So he can jump into that news channels, see what that new push notification is all about. Again, these push notifications are a 100% content managed thing within the cockpit. So adding images is like a drag and drop process, adding all your copy for your push notification is right there to add all that text as well. And then the really slick part about this is the ability to in those push notifications, you know, insert call to actions for customers to actually engage with. So if there's a direct thing, they may be able to do like, sign up for an event or, you know, renewal membership. As a good example, they'll be able to do that right there from the push notification. So as you think about RecConnect, integration, and so on, I've got, you know, n number of clients whose memberships expire this month, I could target all of them send a push notification with a renewal call to action Button that will let them from A to touch process kind of renew their membership right through the app, as opposed to having to kind of chase them down through email and other other avenues. If, for example, I wanted to not get any updates about golf anymore, because I'm not a golfer, you know, I can Click that channel in the app. And I can just say, hey, go to the little settings gear at the top on that channel and kind of silenced the push notifications for that channel. So they don't pop up on my phone all the time, I'll still see the badge in the app that there's new messages. But from a push notification on my phone standpoint, I'll stop seeing the ones about golf.
Dave Writz 21:49
Bryan circling back to the idea of the sub navigation, making that user journey as good as we can make it. I think one of the things to talk about in Brian, when he walked through kind of the youth basketball was ending up on the equivalent of an activity search page. But I did want to I know you know, this prime, but the idea that we can go beyond the search page, we could go right to an item page. And we have an example of that here. Like if I Click on my events option. It's kind of all about our ticketed events. And then sub navigation page one for that user journey. So giving them options, are you looking for a or b reserved or general admission, so I'm looking for general admission. So now we're moving to another kind of experience page to help them on their path. Oh, and yet I want to, it's the ball. And I read Halloween was two days ago. But if that's what I wanted, I could Click this. And at this point, it is connecting to WebTrac. Again, but it's not bringing me to a search page, it's bringing me right to the very specific detailed info page for that item, in this case, the Halloween ball. And from here, I can again, do my Add to Cart process. And off we go through like Bryan said that fully integrated, standard WebTrac workflow, if nothing else has to has to happen for us to be able to complete that. So I think that's a good example to show Bryan.
Bryan Gillilan 23:11
Yep. And this kind of goes across the board for any page you can ultimately arrive at in WebTrac, we can send you directly there from an app tile from an app call to action Button, whatever the case is, you're going to be able to integrate to that level. And it's going to be a little simpler than it may be today where if you wanted to do something like that on a splash page on your or on your website, somebody has to go Parson entire URL out and send it over within the app, you're going to be able to add what's called an SSL module to a tile, which basically tells it hey, go to WebTrac and make sure the single sign ons executed, and then go to an activity search page or an Item Info page and pass in the kind of item you want to go to it for. So there's gonna be some slick abilities to do that. Now, the next thing that you're gonna be able to do that's really key is kind of handled promotions for your organization. So I have a standard app landing page. But I've got this new event, I want to get it in front of everybody in my community, I want everybody to engage with it, when they engage with the app, I can set a temporary landing page for my app as a promotion, that is going to really allow me to anytime somebody opens the app, oh, bang, they're going to see this promotion page first. They can acknowledge it, maybe interact with a call to action Button to book something right away. Or they can go to the home Screen, at which point, they're no longer going to see that page again, unless they completely close out of the app on their device. So now they can browse as they normally would to find all the things about my organization. If they were to completely close the app and reopen it, they'd potentially get that promo page again until I decide I don't want that on there anymore. And again, the ability to add and remove those promo pages can be done and you know in a matter of minutes, not, you know, no code, no dev effort, no needing to talk to Vermont systems or needing to talk to some third party, your marketing team would be able to handle that all on their own.
Dave Writz 25:12
Ya know, Brian, we're almost the time we want to leave a couple minutes for some of the questions that may be out there. But I did want to show that promo stuff cuz I think it's a really powerful tool for the marketing folks involved in this call to help again, target your consumer and get them engaged with those events and those offerings that you really want to make front and center using the promo.
Bryan Gillilan 25:32
Couple questions that I've seen come in that I think we can answer really quickly. So does the app change size? If I'm using it on a tablet versus a mobile phone? Yeah, absolutely, it's going to maintain this kind of aspect ratio structure within the app. So it is meant to be used in a portrait kind of mode for the kind of base app content. One thing I did want to call out maybe Dave, if you can jump to the Anytown.
Bryan Gillilan 26:05
Is you do really have the ability to embed any third party web content you want directly within your app. So just a really basic example of this here, you can send out news updates, and these are managed right within the app. So this is like content managed through the cockpit, you can create news articles, with a little kind of image, title of the news article, you can drill in, you get to create your copy, upload images into your copy, whatever the case may be. If you want to keep your community informed on things going on with Parks and Rec, they're able to share those articles to others with the app and to others in general. So they kind of share that info right from within the app. And then the other cool kind of third party content that you're going to be able to kind of integrate with any other website. So for example, if your folks struggled to find a park, and you don't want to go through the hassle of building in a park finder into municipal website, or whatever the case is, we've got a good example here of like a park finder that's really just leveraging kind of Google Maps google search capability. But embedded within the app. So customer doesn't even realize they went to a third party site right within the app, they can come in, we're really just leveraging a Google search here at this point. If they wanted to use the Google app, instead, at this point, they may get prompted depending on their their device, here, we can stay stay on the web.
Zach Malloch 27:27
while that's loading, it just seems like a lot of the questions that are coming in or wanting to see like specific things in the app. And you know, we're already at 228, we don't have time to go through all of these requests. But I do want to reiterate, I put this in chat, because I forgot to mention it at the top of the session. We're not gonna be talking about price or anything here. But we are at the point of doing demos and discussing price with individual customers. So if you're interested in seeing something specific for your department, if you're interested in how much it would cost for your department or what the availability is. I mean, I think the availability is basically, whenever you can get the Demo and decide to sign up at this point.
Dave Writz 28:05
This is probably something we should talk to Zach a little bit and Bryan can take it. But the plan for the release of this the official release, Bryan?
Bryan Gillilan 28:15
So yeah, we are. Yeah, so in November, here, we're gonna be going through initial pilot beta customers for WebTrac and getting them integrated and onto the app. So we can get some kind of market feedback of real live users with the app of customers of ours. And then we're gonna kind of be iterating on that and opening up the app for general availability starting in December. So time is now we're we're ready to kind of talk to folks and kind of work through their their needs. One of the things I know it's been asked a lot in the chat history looking at it is, you know, Can Can a customer see XYZ thing in the app, or what is what does this feature look like in the app. And when we talk about where we're integrating the WebTrac, where a customer does the purchase process? Today, it looks just like it would if they were on a mobile device on the web, with WebTrac. So again, key there being one, everybody on the Next Gen UI for WebTrac. So they can take advantage of those kinds of more mobile responsive pages. And then as we identify kind of areas where we can more natively integrate some functions and workflows into the app, we'll be doing that as well over the coming years. So thinking of things like bookings, there may be some more native ability for us to do some new UI things through the app directly, as opposed to integrating right over to WebTrac. And we'll be kind of taking those on a case by case basis as we identify areas where we can really look to improve the holistic workflow all the way through from kind of discovery to cart to completion. We'll be looking to kind of look for those opportunities to further this kind of app functionality. But again, today, anything you can do on the web, you can do through the app, and it'll essentially look the same on WebTrac ePACT are same in the app as it does on the mobile version of the WebTrac. site. So customers should be really familiar with the process, if they're used to using it on their mobile device already through the website.
Zach Malloch 30:12
I think that that kind of broadly takes care of a lot of questions. Once again, if you have more questions, if you want to get a deeper look at this, if you're at the symposium next week, you will get that if not just email sales@Vermontsystems.com. And let them know that you'd like to have a Demo and get a little bit more specific into it. Get some quotes and get on the list for December. Unless you guys have or I guess I'll turn it over we are at we're actually a little bit past time. So thanks, everybody, for sticking with us. But any closing remarks, Dave, or Bryan?
Dave Writz 30:46
I'll just reiterate what Zach just said, definitely reach out to the sales team. So at sales@vermontystems.com. We're happy to engage and hopefully answer your detailed and specific questions. So looking forward to the opportunity.
Bryan Gillilan 30:58
I think from the product side, we're absolutely 100% Looking for client feedback as we get rolling with the app, or if you have, you know, some functionality or feature maybe you've been thinking about developing your own app for your municipality. And there's there's things you didn't see covered here as something that is possible through the app that you'd like to advocate for. Again, we are always open to feedback. And I think again, those conversations can be had as part of sales demos, they can be held as part of those presentations, or they can be sent directly to productmanagement@Vermont systems.
Zach Malloch 31:33
And this will not be the as I mentioned, this will not be the only time we talk about the WebTrac app through a RecChat chat session. So expect to see this pop up in your invitations again in the near future. But thank you Dave, thank you, Bryan for unveiling this very exciting new bit of technology for our customers and their patrons. And unless anybody else has anything else, I think Bret we're ready to take it in for a landing. Thanks