Canadian Paralympic Committee

The Canadian Paralympic Committee is the private, non-profit organization representing Canadian Paralympic athletes in the International Paralympic Committee and the Parapan American Games. It represents 25 member sports organisations. The CPC's vision is to be the world's leading Paralympic nation.

To increase its medal count and federal funding, the organization needed to grow by attracting and engaging future successful athletes with impairments. The Canadian Paralympic Committee website provided important and relevant overall information but the organization determined that it required additional functionality targeted to prospective athletes, to make the growth a reality.

The solution involved building two custom tools able to handle the new functionality. With “Find a Sport”, a user starts by selecting a general disability type from the interface and then uses additional filtering to query for a deeper, more specific sports suggestion. This tool was created using a multi-level tagging structure to provide detailed filtering. Contextual information for the individual sports pages was also pulled in to provide a more informative user experience.

For the “Find a Club” tool, Google’s Geolocation API was used to determine the user’s position and facilitate the mapping feature. The tool uses the user’s geographic proximity to sort through the clubs database and provides an alphabetical listing of sports facilities within the distance range. Further filtering is performed using the taxonomies to determine club type (national, provincial or local). The listing delivers a link to the club page, providing a description, map, sport, club type and contact information.

The website benefits from using a single, streamlined process to handle both the “Find a Sport” and “Find a Club” tools. The committee has the ability to re-use the functionality for other applications and configurations. As an extension of this project, an additional tool to allow site visitors to “Find an Activity” (lessons, training guides and other athlete resources) is currently in the works. There has also been interesting from other sports organizations in using the “Find a Club” and “Find an Activity” functionality.

Work for the Canadian Paralympic Committee further continues with the team engaged to provide extra informal consulting, create additional functionality on the front page, and migrate the complete site to platform-as-a-service hosting from Acquia Cloud.