The British Columbia Recreation and Parks Association (BCRPA) is the professional organization dedicated to enhancing quality of life in our province that the Regional District of Central Kootenay belongs to, as do most leisure services providers in B.C. The BCRPA is a not-for-profit organization and its extensive network of members in the parks, recreation, physical activity and culture sector support the development of healthy individuals and communities, and sustainable environments and economies. Since 1958, the BCRPA has provided leadership, training and support, fostering the principles of accessibility and inclusiveness, to help its members meet provincial and local health and physical activity priorities. That’s kind of a dry read, but it does sum up the overall philosophy.
One project currently underway within the organization relates to you and what happens when you walk to the front desk or register online. At present, we use a software program called Class, which is a pretty powerful tool also used across North America and in some pretty big centres. This is where we enter your information when you come to register for a course, rent a room for a wedding or just come in and pay admission to go for a swim. Class has been around for maybe 20 years or so and was originally developed in Vancouver and expanded from there, both in distribution and functionality. It allows us to keep track of clients, create reports on visits and usage to develop better programming, assign room or facility rentals and accompanying accounting requirements, and book appropriate time for maintenance. The program does way more than can be summed up in a sentence or two but needless to say with the traffic we see through here, it would be incredibly challenging to keep track of everything on paper as we did in the past. So the bad news is that the company is dropping support for Class in 2017 — sort of like Microsoft dropped support for XP (and everything else before it).
So BCRPA began pulling people together, first as a forum last year and now to the point where we are part of a group of about 19 municipalities throughout B.C. forming the Parks and Recreation Management Software Joint Municipal Collaboration. This group is currently developing a request for proposal for new software, which, at the end of the day, will result in seeing what is out there to make the transition to. The scope of the project is actually huge and involves input right from the level of programmers and maintenance requirements right through to finance and administration. Groups have split out to address needs and wants in structured programming, unstructured recreation, point of sale, financial processes, space management, customer relations and technical requirements. One of the benefits through collaboration is access to business analysts, which are a function of some of the larger municipalities on the Lower Mainland.
So, long story short, in a couple years we will probably see a better and more current software package tailored to leisure services and municipality’s specific needs. As with all technology, it has changed so radically over a short period of time that sometimes it is better to start from scratch than keep adding to an older platform. For the patron, you may not notice anything too different other than ease of use and connectivity but there will be some big changes under the surface.
Neil Ostafichuk is the recreation supervisor at the Creston and District Community Complex.
