The Girl Scouts of USA’s safety net for surging Summer Camp registrations
The Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) is a global youth organization for girls with millions of members, predominantly in the United States. It utilizes a centralized, online membership and program registration system for its geographically related councils, each of which has its own website.
Challenge
When councils open their summer camp programs for online registrations each spring, end-users vie for the limited spots at their respective council’s camp sessions for which they register their participants. Historically, high user volume hitting some of the larger councils’ websites caused very degraded system performance and end-user dissatisfaction.
Solution
GSUSA engaged Queue-it to manage the flow of users to selected councils’ websites during the summer camp registration opening days. Visitors found the queue pages and mechanisms to be fair, informative and helpful. Council management teams were also impressed by seeing the numbers of visitors coming to their sites and other available information. They also appreciated the stable system and support maintained throughout the registration period.
"We are very pleased with the support we received during both the planning and testing stages as well as the actual camp opening days. Not only were our questions answered clearly, but process improvements were suggested and we experienced near-real time support whenever it was needed."
Girl Scouts of the USA
Results
The application of Queue-it to manage the flow of users resulted in a very smooth registration process, with a very controllable impact on system performance thanks to Queue-it’s flexibility and functions. Initially, GSUSA planned to use Queue-it only at times of anticipated high end-user volume. However, GSUSA decided to maintain Queue-it and its 24/7 visitor peak protection feature in the event of unpredicted online traffic spikes.
"Given the successes we’ve experienced, we’ve decided to utilize Queue-it in a general case as a ‘safety net’ for all councils in order to manage unexpected incidents of high volume in a proactive rather than reactive manner. Queue-it is a well-designed and well-implemented product."
Girl Scouts of the USA
About Girl Scouts of the USA
Founded in 1912 as a girls’ youth organization with 2.6 million current members, Girl Scouts of the USA focuses on empowering and fostering skills development within its participants.