Author Archives: Megan Lavine

Megan Lavine

About Megan Lavine

Megan Lavine is on the PR team at Active Network and gets Active by gardening, cooking and doing yoga.
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YMCA of Greater San Antonio migrates to ACTIVE Net

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We’re excited to announce that one of our largest YMCA customers, the YMCA of Greater San Antonio, is migrating from Class® software  to ACTIVE Net™ so that their staff can operate more efficiently and create an awesome member experience by providing easy access to its activities, like spring flag football, boot camp and swim lessons, online.

I sat down with Liesien Benet, Vice President of IT at the YMCA of Greater San Antonio, to understand how this technology can help her staff better engage with their 50,000+ members.

Liesien said that with ACTIVE Net, “The YMCA of Greater San Antonio IT staff won’t have to spend the time maintaining database servers, worrying about PCI compliance or purchasing additional hardware. Our front-office staff can easily access the system anywhere at any time and can focus on creating a great member experience.”

Check out ACTIVE Net in action at YMCAs across North America, including Odessa Family YMCA in Odessa, Texas and Randolph County YMCA in Winchester, Indiana.

To learn more, see the full news releaseor visit http://www.activecommunities.com/technology-solutions/non-profit-overview.htm.

The Rise of the Experiential Consumer

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As Running USA 2013: The Industry Conference wraps up this week, Dave Alberga, ACTIVE’s Executive Chairman, shares with us a few thoughts on how he see’s the endurance industry growing and evolving, and how ACTIVE is evolving with it.

The participant landscape is changing and we are witnessing what I like to call the rise of the experiential consumer.

We live in the “Go Pro” era where everyone wants to be a hero in their own movie—more and more money is being spent in search of experiences that can serve as the backdrop for that movie.

Whether it’s the Spokane Hoopfest or the surge of play in adult sport and social clubs or the hyper-social Mob events, experience is the new luxury.

If you had told me a year ago that a 5K series would capture the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of participants by throwing colored corn starch on them as they ran, I would have said that you were crazy….and I would have been wrong.

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2013 White House Easter Egg Roll Lottery Opens Today!

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You better hop to it – the 2013 White House Easter Egg Roll ticket lottery opens today! Enter to win a ticket to one of the most popular Easter Egg Rolls in town, here.

Because of the high demand to attend this event, the White House – through Recreation.gov – holds a lottery for tickets every year and its our technology that powers the Recreation.gov website, as well as the lottery administration. More than 57,000 people applied last year for roughly 12,000 tickets and this year it’s expected to be just as popular.

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Trust Your Gut, But Use Your Data

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Michelle Mercier, our communities marketing maven, shares her insights into a discussion she helped host at a recent camps conference:

Last week, ACTIVE brought together a panel discussion at the American Camps Association National Conference in Dallas to discuss how camps are beginning to challenge the status quo and to use data as a core decision making tool. I thought I’d share a few key takeaways from the panel…

“Aligning programs with parents’ goals”
Avid4Adventure, an outdoor adventure camp, wanted to revamp their camp programs to better align with parents’ evolving needs. To do this, they put together a carefully thought-out process to uncover what their customers—moms—were truly looking for in terms of youth development. Combining the quantitative and qualitative data they collected, Avid4Adventure was able to create a new curriculum that not only met parents’ goals for their kids but could also be easily articulated in their marketing materials in a way that made sense to parents.

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Iron Girl Mobilizes Race Day with ACTIVE On-Site

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We sat down the other week with Iron Girl VP, Judy Molnar, to chat about how mobile technology has helped her and her staff manage activities and participants more efficiently… from anywhere!

Launched in 2004 with just two events, the Iron Girl brand has grown to 13 events nationwide, varying in distance from 5K, 10K, 1/2 marathon to duathlon and triathlon. Judy says their 5K events register more and more people on-site and needed an efficient way to process on-site registrations, both for her staff and for the participant.

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CouchCachet Wins Big With ACTIVE’s API @ Foursquare Hackathon

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Developers and designers came together recently at the 2013 FourSquare Hackathon to build some sweet hacks that allow people to connect to activities…anywhere!

Couch Cachet won ‘Best App’ for using an API from the Mashery API Network — ACTIVE’s Activity Search API.

By integrating API’s from ACTIVE and FourSquare, the hack finds cool activities going on near you, like events, races, tournaments, classes or leagues, and checks you in on FourSquare.

Congrats to hackers Brian Fountain, Justin Isaf, Harlie Levine, and Christopher Kennedy (pictured above)! If you are headed to SXSW next month, meet up with the team at the Mashery Circus Mashimus tent.

To learn more, check out our ACTIVE Access blog, here.

 

“Mobile First” at Recent BRAND-AID Conference

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ACTIVE’s mobile guru, Courtney Ferguson, shares her recent presentation at BRAND-AID and why the rapper, Eminem, could teach us a thing or two about delighting customers through mobile. 

More iPhones were sold than babies born per day in the US last year, mobile design expert, Luke Wroblewski, said recently.

As I talked about this stat and how incredibly fast mobile technology is growing at a recent BRAND-AID presentation, I could tell that many walked away a little shell-shocked.

Organized by the cities of Grand Prairie, Arlington, and Grapevine, more than 100 Park and Recreation Departments from across the state of Texas recently came together to learn more about the latest trends in social media, marketing and mobile.

I spoke about how we now live in a “mobile first” world. Apps and websites must be designed and tailor-fitted with experiences optimized for these 80% smaller, mobile screens from day one. Not only do the experiences need to fit the device you’re using, but your data, service and content needs to be optimized as well.

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ACTIVE’s Alpha Warriors

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We were pumped to be some of the first to take on our customer, Alpha Warrior, and their adrenaline-charged challenge! Recently, the Alpha team brought seven of the 20+ obstacles to ACTIVE’s San Diego office as a two-day test run. Like kids awaiting recess, our team watched in excited anticipation as a massive playground was built in our backyard. Check out the ACTIVE team in the video above as we took on a challenge that promised no mud, no miles and no mercy.

Reporting Live From Macworld/iWorld

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As director of marketing for ACTIVE Network Business Solutions group, Cece Salomon-Lee is our resident expert on all things event marketing. Below, Cece reports on Macworld/iWorld conference buzz from the epicenter of all the excitement. 

Credit: MacWorld 2012

Starting today, more than 20,000 Mac enthusiasts will descend upon the Moscone Center for the annual Macworld/iWorld conference in San Francisco. As the event technology partner for Macworld/iWorld, we conducted an informal, wholly playful, definitely unscientific survey to get a sense of what exhibitors were planning for this year’s event!

Getting people to your booth
One of the challenges that many exhibitors face is attracting the right prospects – customers and partners – to their booth. And with all the innovative products and educational sessions at Macworld/iWorld, we were interested in knowing how exhibitors planned to rise above the noise.

Social media was the most select marketing tactic with online marketing and product giveaways following. Interestingly, mobile marketing lagged behind, indicating that maybe, despite the saturation of smart phones, exhibitors have not caught on to mobile marketing just yet.

For the adventurous, mobile marketing may just be the way to rise above the noise!

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