The Virtual Y

Captivating websites to increase online engagement

The YMCAs approached Five Jars to create a website presenting their video content in an engaging and captivating way in order to foster their online presence. All YMCAs are non-profit organizations and as such have only a limited budget available. To leverage their means, a group of several YMCAs approached us with a nearly identical request. This allowed us to deliver a comprehensive, future-proof video content website. To facilitate seamless integration into the existing environment, we have built our solutions on Open Y and integrated the Virtual Y functionality.

A content strategy to excel

The YMCAs had already a considerable number of video content available for the website. However, more was required for the platform to create an outstanding user experience from the very beginning on. Therefore, Five Jars embarked on a content strategy journey and crafted a content strategy fostering overall marketing success. We guided our clients to plan content which led to organic web traffic and fostered their online presence.

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Website for live streams

The websites not only provide access to on-demand video content but, furthermore, facilitate the hosting of live events. The importance of live events surely increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, will likely remain high even once the pandemic will be over. With this in mind, Five Jars created a website solution that enables users to create, disseminate and start live streams easily and intuitively.

Integrated Single Sign-on

Five Jars upholds user-centricity as one of the cornerstones of successful online solutions. Therefore, we have implemented a single sign-on solution based on Daxko, ActiveNet, Personify and TractionRec. This streamlines the users’ access to the platform as well as all the other user-only content of the YMCAs with only one sign on only. This creates an outstanding user experience.

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Video stored on Vimeo

To host on-demand content as well as live streams seamlessly, the infrastructure must be able to handle high volumes of web traffic. To ensure a smooth rendering of all content, Five Jars decided to use a well-established video sharing platform to host all videos. Therefore, the entire video content is hosted on Vimeo, which effectively reduces the infrastructure requirements of the platform. Moreover, live events can easily be created and integrated onto the website via API.

Smooth video content platforms in less than a month

Five Jars created a content strategy for the YMCAs that integrates marketing in a comprehensive manner. Moreover, we have helped the group of YMCAs to uphold their members-only promises and create content available to their members alone. As they did not have any other option, all prior videos and live streams were shared via Facebook, allowing anyone to access this outstanding content. With our solution, they no longer must decide whether to provide content for everyone or no content at all.

Last but not least, Five Jars proved to understand the pain points of its customers by fulfilling both the financial and technical limitations into one sophisticated solution. Specifically, we managed to create all three websites below the maximum budget as well as reduce the infrastructure requirements by hosting the content on a third-party platform. And the best thing – we’ve done all these amazing things in just under one month.

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