Every year, the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers invites their fellow livery companies to a charity skiing competition, originally hosted in Morzine, France. As one of the Great XII Livery Companies of the City of London, their links to the Iron trade date back 700 years.

“The team at Novatura have been absolutely brilliant throughout building our new web platform. We are very pleased and would highly recommend their services. ”

Emma Halford-MacLeod

Organiser, Worshipful Company of Ironmongers

Recurring Admin Workload

Each competition creates a significant admin burden for volunteer organisers. Since they had day jobs, any time commitment would have to come from evenings and weekends. The Ironmongers wanted to improve this situation for the team. With the first competition after the pandemic opening for registrations soon, they needed to move quickly if they were going to make a meaningful change in time for it.

When we first met the Ironmongers they pointed out the main issues with their current spreadsheet-based system:

• Time consuming: Organisers would often manually comb through multiple spreadsheets to chase bookings, payments, and other information.
• Manual data entry: The organisers had to move data between multiple sheets, which was a tedious and error-prone process resulting in data duplication.
• Communication issues: With hundreds of applicants from over 30 teams, the back and forth was messy, and duplicated messages were causing friction.

Off-the-shelf event tools weren’t the answer. The Ironmongers’ main constraint was delegated approvals: since applications were arriving from dozens of separate institutions, it was down to the captains to approve their own teams. Most tools would assume a single organiser and a flat list of attendees, not the multi-team register used by the competition. Data also had to be kept separate between teams. A captain in one team shouldn’t be able to see other teams’ sensitive information.

A Bespoke Solution

We worked with the Ironmongers to identify the system’s requirements. The project was scoped to meet the needs of the upcoming competition, with optional enhancements deferred to a post-event deliverable. We designed the proposed system’s information architecture, so that it could comfortably accommodate the multi-team setup, keep data separated, and be extensible enough for future features.

• Hands-off workflow: Participants could now register by themselves. Captains could approve and reject bookings without back and forth with the organisers.
• Spreadsheet import / export: Organisers in Morzine needed offline capabilities, and backwards compatibility made the new system much easier to adopt.
• Automated progress updates: Organisers no longer needed to send so many emails. The system kept all captains and applicants up to date with their progress.

Year on Year Improvement

The system was built in time for the upcoming event. Everything went smoothly, with the new platform handling the admin for over 250 attendees. With the admin burden lifted, organisers were quick to note how much time the system saved them and how much easier registration had become. Deferring some of the optional enhancements made the deadline realistic, and those improvements eventually made the following year’s experience even better. Since the platform’s launch, Novatura has been looking after it as well as the WordPress website, making upgrades and supporting the competition each year.

Now, still using the same system we built in 2023, the 2027 competition is accepting registrations, set to take place in Mayrhofen, Austria. This year, the Ironmongers are raising money for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal and Snow Camp. We wish them the best of luck!

If the admin behind your operation is eating away at your team’s evenings, it’s usually work that doesn’t need a person sitting in the middle of it. Novatura builds systems around how you already operate - keeping what works so your team gets their time back without you replacing everything.

If that sounds familiar, get in touch. We’ll get the ball rolling.