Hyde Park Art Center is a popular gathering and production space for artists and the Chicago community, with a focus on the contemporary arts. They offer art exhibitions, classes, and art events. Part of their mission is to make art more accessible to the community. To that end, they wanted to switch to a “pay-what-you-can” model for their classes. The software they had in place made this difficult, and the system would often crash due to the high volume of visitors during registration time. Hyde Park needed a solution that aligned with their pricing model and improved the registration process. DB Services built a user-friendly website that supported their “pay-what-you-can” pricing model and implemented a queuing system for registration, ensuring that the system would no longer crash.

The Challenge

Hyde Park had a software solution that didn’t align with their pricing model that allowed for donations of any amount. They were using complicated workarounds in an attempt to make the software work for them, but it was difficult and inefficient. Their software would often crash during class registration due to the high volume of visitors. They knew they needed a solution that better fit their needs and improved user experience. In addition, they were losing out on critical donations due to registrants skipping past the donation page in order to secure their spot in class before it was gone.

The Solution

DB Services built them a custom website that fully supported their pricing model using AWS tools, including Amplify, Cognito, DynamoDB, and Lambda. They also implemented a queuing system for class registration to ensure that the website would not crash during registration. The queue was critical to support the high volume of users during registration while also allowing users time to make donations to the organization without worrying about losing their spot in class.

The Results

The new website allowed for a pay-what-you-can pricing model, which better aligned with the organization’s goals and helped to further its mission of making art more accessible to the community. In addition, site crashes during registration are now a thing of the past, allowing for a much better registrant experience.