Tag: EventSprout

Warrior Dash – US Map Event Navigation

If you’re not familiar with Warrior Dash, it’s a 5k obstacle course mud run and festival with event locations across the country.

Typically starting in February (in Florida), Warrior Dash moves across the country for one or two-day events until the end of the year.

Ideally, a customer would go on the site and easily see the closest event location to them (which we would later implement).

At the time, the site only showed locations by date and by alphabetical order – there was no easy was to quickly see that there was an event in Maryland or New York without scanning the page for words.

It was not ideal and the page’s bounce rate reflected that.

The Build

The quickest solution was to add a clickable map of the US that highlighted upcoming events.

A visitor could clearly and instantly see that their state was highlighted and click to the event page to learn more and checkout.

Building the map to work with the existing event data was tricky.

The events themselves were handled by a WordPress Custom Post Type that had been extended over the years using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Each had a text description of the address, a latitude & longitude, and a state input.

In order to turn around the project in a timely manner, I opted to use a jQuery map library and highlight states instead of pinpointing the exact event location on the map. This had the added benefit of increasing click-thru rates for curious residents and gave the location page a chance to convert users who may have felt far away from the event location.

This left both the address and coordinate fields moot and the state input had been used poorly as a location nickname. In short, I had to add a new field for the coordinator to use for state abbreviation.

Now that events had proper state abbreviations, I appended the information to the pre-existing location HTML elements on the page and used jQuery to fill out the map data. No need to duplicate Database queries!

The map was now at a point where the active states were highlighted in red and the past states in blue – each clickable.

It’s not just pretty, but massively effective as well.

Average time on this page toppled from a whopping 6:25 to merely 25s over 5 months – a reflection that people no longer needed to figure out the page in order to move forward.

Bonus Points: Email List Growth

But what about the other states?

The Warrior Dash team is always looking for supporting data to help them decide to host in a new state.

Using a data structure I had already built for the site’s email marketing platform, Emarsys, I added the inactive state abbreviations to their map links. Then, I created a landing page for these clicks that automatically pre-selected the state in an email signup form.

Users could now easily click their state, land on a signup page with their state selected, and just fill in their email to become part of this “state waitlist”.

The result: a steady uptick of new email signups for inactive states.

EventSprout – Mass Import

EventSprout is an event management and Ecommerce solutions that event organizers use to sell tickets.

In a typical sale, a single user goes to buy a single ticket and the checkout is very simple.

But what if a group wants to buy tickets? Or an organization comprising of dozens or even hundreds of participants? A single checkout process would take hours and with so much information added to one server request, it could break the process altogether.

The solution? Adding mass import functionality for customer support to use at their discretion for these large sales.

In short, the organization would send over an excel file filled out with member information. Everything from name and age to shirt size and address could be filled out before hand and uploaded to EventSprout for mass order creation.

First, I needed to validate that the file was a CSV. Excel files, PDFs, and other images types don’t produce clean data for use in segmenting multiple users and their data.

After validating a proper file had been uploaded, the user would select the event these customers were attending and select whether or not the system should email users after successfully adding them. Easy enough.

Status: It’s Complicated

Though fields like first name, last name, and email are required for every single event on the platform, each event can have unlimited additional questions for participants to fill out such as age, address, gender, shirt size, etc – each requiring their own custom validation rules.

I needed a way to preview a few of the uploaded columns and allow the user to select which column was for each event question. This included the ability to ignore an unnecessary column and ensuring no duplicate columns were selected by accident.

Additionally, there was no simple way to choose which ticket these customers wanted. EventSprout doesn’t know that GA stands for General Admission, so I had to build out a “ticket translator” for the user. For any event, it would generate the proper value of the ticket name, including the groups it was nested under. If this proper name was not added to the ticket column, it would throw an error.

Speaking of Errors

Now, what if a row had an error? Should we invalidate the entire import?

I decided to allow successful orders through and create a new CSV of failed rows – including their error message – so that the user could correct the data and re-upload with ease.

If that all sounds easy enough, let’s remember that this had to work within the existing platform and a ton of core code needed to be modified in order to pass through orders in this way. Code that was in use on an existing Ecommerce platform that handles hundreds of thousands of dollars of transactions for their clients, not in a pre-launch development bubble.

So, in that light, I created unit tests to run against every new commit that tested both the success and failure of mass imported CSVs.

In the end, the packaged product solved the problem nicely to the delight of customer service reps who had to enter all these customers manually before.