Midland Trailquests (MTQ) operate Mountain Bike Orienteering competitions across the greater Midlands area. Competitors are issued with a map and have to visit as many control locations as possible within the time allowed.
Prior to working with Perceptis, event entries were handled with paper forms and cheques, with results and league placings being calculated by spreadsheets that needed constant tweaking and re-work.
As the organisation was growing the work was becoming far too time consuming for both the volunteer event organisers and central administrators and a way of automating things was badly needed.
Midland Trailquests commissioned Perceptis to develop a brand new website for them that would automate the majority of these repetitive tasks, make life easier for event organisers, and promote the sport to new members as well as encouraging event entries.
The website removed the burden of having to process memberships by implementing an online membership system that takes each rider's details, verifies them, and then automatically creates a membership account with a unique membership number.
An events calendar feature displays all future events in a regular and consistent way. To enter an event, members can simply click a button, sign into their account, and then pay online for the event entry.
Upon successful confirmation of order the event organiser is automatically notified of the new entry and the system creates a pre-filled insurance disclaimer form for the entrant(s) to sign and bring to the event.
The Midland Trailquests website is able to import results from a scoring spreadsheet used by organisers at their event, and automatically publishes the results and calculates the league tables.
As riders can compete solo or in teams of two and organisers receive a bonus score in lieu of not being able to compete themselves, these calculations are very complex and automating them has completely removed the need for administrative staff to do this as well as ensuring the results are totally accurate.
Since implementing the website and with the help of some carefully researched search engine optimisation, MTQ has grown its membership by ten fold, to more than two thousand individuals.
