The Smyrna Parks and Recreation Department in Georgia offers everything from summer camps and aquatics to fitness classes, special events and programming across hundreds of spaces. 

But accessing those programs online wasn’t always as easy as it should have been. Residents often ran into issues registering and paying online, especially on their phones, so transactions that should have been simple often required staff help. 

For a department that serves 56,000+ residents across different ages, schedules and activities, Smyrna wanted a registration experience that worked for all, whether during the busy summer camp rush or late at night after the Parks office closed.

So Smyrna turned to Rec to help manage one of its biggest registration moments of the year: summer camp. Hundreds of families were trying to secure spots at the same time, making it an early test of both the resident experience and the platform’s ability to handle demand. 

A Smooth Summer Camp Registration Day

When camp registration opened on April 6 at 8:00 AM, more than 400 camper weeks were booked in the first hour, without staff needing to process the registrations. By the end of the first day, Smyrna had processed hundreds of camp registrations without any service interruptions during the rush.

Nearly two-thirds of registrations went through Fast Track, which lets families complete their information and fill their carts ahead of time and check out quickly once registration opens.

“Our members are raving about Fast Track. One resident used it to preregister for three programs and was amazed by how much time it saved him. It’s transforming registration into the quick, seamless experience our community has been asking for.”

— Jodi Mills, Programs Coordinator, City of Smyrna, GA

Another win for the city was that most residents completed camp registration on their own. Ninety-three percent (93%) of summer camp sign-ups came through self-service registration.

Recreation That Doesn’t Depend on Office Hours

As Smyrna expanded to add more programs onto Rec, residents self-served about 80% of all registrations. Residents are no longer limited by the department’s operating hours. Nearly one in three paid online transactions happened before 8 AM, after 6 PM, or on a weekend. More than 550 transactions were placed between 10 PM and 6 AM alone.

For residents, that means they can register at a time that fits their day rather than when the Parks & Recreation office is open. For staff, it means fewer routing transactions start with a phone call, email, or a trip to the front desk. Smyrna is even seeing this shift across age groups. At Smyrna’s Wolfe Center, 66% of fitness class sign-ups were completed online by participants themselves, accounting for 9,000+ registrations!

One Platform That Can Keep Growing with Smyrna

Today, all of Smyrna’s Parks & Recreation programming runs on Rec, including children’s and adult classes, aquatics, fitness memberships, camps, and more. 

The city has also expanded into Events & Ticketing, using Rec for its citywide Birthday Celebration headlined by country star Darius Rucker. The same platform a resident uses to reserve a pavilion at Rose Garden Park or book a spot in Mat Pilates can also support ticket sales, concessions and event entry for major city events, giving staff one system to manage experiences that previously would have required separate tools.

Rec’s reporting has also given Smyrna’s leadership a clearer view of performance across programs and events. “With Rec, I can pull up the reporting and immediately see which programs are driving revenue and where registrations are slowing down,” said Richard Garland, Director, Parks & Recreation. “I don’t have to wait for someone to build a spreadsheet or spend time figuring out which report to run. The information is right there, so we can make decisions much faster.”

For Smyrna, the change isn’t simply that more transactions are happening online; residents can increasingly manage recreation on their own, at the time that works best for them, while staff spend less time stepping into transactions that don’t require their help. Residents now have a simpler way to register, book and pay, while staff can manage more of the department in one place.

That gives Smyrna more room to keep growing community recreation without creating more work to manage it.

Interested in seeing what a more self-service recreation experience could look like for your department? Reach out to the Rec team to learn more: https://partner.rec.us/book-a-demo 

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