Since 1966, Youth Science Canada (YSC) has been at the forefront in organizing K-12 science fairs across the country at both the regional and national levels, much of their effort focused on organizing the more than 8,000 dedicated volunteers nationwide to make these events happen. YSC’s hand-coded online database and registration system was developed in 2005 and was vulnerable to security and stability issues. Its outdated tech stack and website also meant the organization faced huge limitations when it came to engaging with regional and national science fair participants, volunteers, and judges.
So YSC turned to Relish to overhaul its digital ecosystem; build a new management portal to support youth STEM projects and events at the regional and national levels; design and build an entirely new website; enhance its overall business processes; and build capacity to deliver the organization’s strategic priorities at scale.
Using a combination of WordPress and purpose-built third-party plugins and services, the organization can better connect with its network of regional fairs to offer a cohesive digital experience and to capture and store relevant data in relevant places. Our expert user experience designers and WordPress developers ensured that the complex backend didn’t trickle over to the frontend. The platform is now equipped to handle the myriad tasks and functions it was intended for.
We greatly enhanced the user experience for youth, regions, key volunteers, and staff. On the front end, it’s now a breeze for judges, volunteers, finalists, and delegates to register for the Canada Wide Science Fair. It’s also easier for judges to do their important work like input scores and assign award winners.
And it’s much more intuitive on the backend for administrators to assign judges, register regional affiliates, send invoices, granting insurance certificates to regional affiliates, input stats from regional fairs, communicate through the platform, and safely store user info as well as relevant policies and documents.
