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The Youth Sports Foundation (YSF) plays a vital role in bringing communities together through sports, offering young athletes a chance to participate and grow. However, managing registrations, payments, and team coordination can often be challenging for organizers, especially volunteers.
YSF Co-Founder Jim Miller and Regional Director Joe Payne share how they rose to the challenge of running a volunteer-centric sports organization in an increasingly digital landscape.
YSF has had a significant impact on countless youths, families, and communities. Not long after YSF began, it entered a phase of rapid growth and needed a way to efficiently scale its registration and finance practices.
“We started with teams around communities directly near us. It then snowballed where adjacent communities wanted to get involved. We just kept growing,” explains Miller. As participation increased, the team began looking for ways to digitize and automate manual processes for registrations and payments.
YSF Business Manager Cathy added, “We were pretty close to reaching and surpassing the 10,000-player registration mark. So, we absolutely needed things to run smoothly and efficiently [online].”
With parents eager to sign their children up quickly and securely, YSF needed a reliable solution to manage high payment volumes and improve the registration experience. “Efficiency is kind of the name of the game, especially during our peak season,” says Miller.
To scale with the growing demand, YSF began to automate data collection and management with Cognito Forms, a powerful no-code online form builder. Cognito Forms offered significant process improvements for YSF, both from the administrator's perspective and for registrants.
With Cognito Forms as a PayPal partner, YSF gained the opportunity to leverage PayPal to provide secure and efficient payment processing directly within the registration form. Integrating PayPal allowed for the seamless collection of payments without the need for redirects or pop-ups.
Moving from physical payments to PayPal enabled YSF to offer parents a more convenient, secure, and efficient payment method, while significantly reducing administrative overhead.
The shift from paper forms to digital registration also eliminated the need for parents to juggle cash, checks, or manually entered card details. Instead, payments could be handled at the point of registration within PayPal’s trusted platform.
The decision to use Cognito Forms with PayPal was a game-changer for YSF.
The integration of Cognito Forms with PayPal revolutionized YSF’s registration and payment processes. With PayPal embedded directly in the registration forms, parents can complete payments securely and quickly—whether at home or in the bleachers.
YSF now processes tens of thousands of registrations each year and over $400,000 in payments—without any reliance on physical paperwork. The seamless integration between PayPal and Cognito Forms has helped reduce administrative costs and improve operational efficiency. “We’re constantly using Cognito Forms,” Payne added.
This streamlined approach allows YSF to focus less on paperwork and more on program development and community engagement, keeping their heads in the game.
The partnership between PayPal and Cognito Forms was an ideal solution for YSF. It enabled multiple payment options at checkout, including PayPal, Venmo and all major debit and credit cards, helping YSF speed up the registration process and boost sales.
YSF plans to continue expanding youth sports programs to reach more players across the Midwest. Their journey of innovation and growth proves that it really is possible to maximize efficiency and enhance the checkout experience while fostering a life-long love of sports.
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