YMCA360

For the Y, by the Y

YMCA360 is a proprietary Y platform that brings together the community, places, facilities, and programs with the help of the latest technology. For YMCA associations, it offers capabilities to create, distribute, and reuse exclusive content, plan and organize their work, engage with their audiences, and promote offline activities. At the individual level, it guarantees a premium membership experience and round-the-clock access to classes and materials across various domains – from nutrition and personal development to sports training, activities for kids, art classes, and more.

The strong tech capabilities of the YMCA360 platform enable it to provide an all-encompassing experience across mobile, web, and TV. Presently, the YMCA360 team collaborates with numerous associations throughout the USA, actively onboarding new members and partners and refining their product based on the evolving needs of the Y community.

Our contribution to YMCA360 product development 

The YMCA360 is a complex ecosystem of products and services designed specifically for the Y community with impactful benefits for local branches and individual members. The core functionalities of the platform include on-demand and live content delivery, scheduling, CRM integrations, association and wellness portals, gamification, content management, analytics, and more.

Five Jars is the YMCA360’s technical partner from the product ideation and launch before the pandemic. At that step, we helped the team build an MVP for an on-demand health and wellness platform, laying the basis of the current product.  

As the COVID-19-related restrictions were lessened, the team saw ample opportunities for integrating the technology and YMCA movement and decided to develop the platform further, adding some great functionality. Five Jars joined the project and took over the development of the integral parts of the YMCA360 – content management, content distribution, custom APIs, and more.

Configuring advanced CMS capabilities

Our work with the CMS behind the platform started with a detailed audit of the current challenges and defining requirements for its further development. Together with the YMCA360 team, we outlined the following focus areas for our work:

The Five Jars tech team was also accountable for CMS hosting configuration and has been supporting it since. We created and further developed the CMS infrastructure, fine-tuned and restructured its database, and ensured its fault tolerance – the system's ability to keep running even in the face of failures or malfunctions.

On-demand video content distribution

When the new step of YMCA360 product development started, there were approximately 150 videos on the website. With this number rapidly expanding, two crucial optimizations became imperative – enhancing the end users' ability to search for content on the platform and providing creators with effective tools to organize substantial volumes of material in the CMS. Our team took charge of both these interconnected aspects.

Before the optimization, users could only search for videos by specific keywords in the title or video description. In response to valuable client feedback, we recognized the necessity to broaden the search scope to include general and broad keywords, such as domains, as well as materials by specific instructors, age groups, and more. Our team worked diligently to refine the internal search relevance, implementing features like synonym search and typo tolerance.

The increase of content volume in the CMS required optimization of the video categorization on the system backend as well. To allow content creators to arrange content by different parameters, our engineers:

• Introduced hierarchical categorization in the CMS
• Added the Collections feature to allow organizing the video by topics, difficulty levels, methodology, age, and more 
• Built capabilities to add Featured videos that were shown above other categories
• Introduced the New Releases category that allowed the promotion of newly published content, especially useful for scheduled publications
• Developed Worlds feature that allows grouping videos within specific courses and leveling and use it as a sales instrument promoting programs across associations

Live broadcasting to large audiences

Video content is challenging to work with by default, but the task becomes even more complex when it comes to live streaming. Our team worked on adding the necessary functionality to the system and made broadcasting from multiple devices to large audiences possible for all YMCA360 partners.

We developed a very user-friendly flow for broadcasters. It includes the steps of testing, which helps to prepare everything, fix any inconsistencies, and go live with everything checked in advance. There is also functionality for live streams for recurrent streams, automated repays, and prerecorded sessions. 

One of the challenges with live streams was ensuring multiple sessions do not overlap. We built a special calendar allowing instructors to book the live streaming time and get it approved by platform administrators.

Custom API to ensure multiple integrations

We knew integrations would be a big part of the further product development phase. Our team was responsible for designing and developing a custom REST API that would allow engineers to build connections between the YMCA360 core platform and multiple consumer-facing applications, including mobile and TV apps.

Custom API development is an ongoing process as API evolves together with the new functionality integrated into the platform and should support both old and new versions of the existing apps connected to it. Besides, as the number of applications grows, so does the number of requests and visitors interacting with the content. Our team ensured the API now successfully handles thousands of requests per second and that access to the platform’s data it provides is fast and secure.

Our engineers uphold endpoint consistency, handle API versioning, maintain up-to-date documentation, and minimize prolonged response times and excessive data errors. To guarantee a seamless experience for developers working with our API, the Five Jars engineering team collaborated with colleagues from other teams and carefully considered their feedback when rolling out new API updates.

Releasing YMCA Web Services Platform connector

Our engineering team was crucial in assisting YMCA360 with an additional technical challenge – developing a specialized module for YMCA Web Services Platform (also known as Open Y) sites. This innovative module acts as a seamless connector, empowering associations to seamlessly integrate scheduling functionality into their websites. 

This includes incorporating local schedules, class schedules, live streams, and other YMCA360 content. The implementation of the Web Services Platform connector has reached a significant milestone, as it is now accessible for utilization by the entire YMCA community, further enhancing the digital capabilities and user experience across the movement.

Core results

YMCA360 is a unique product that merges virtual capabilities with the Y-membership experience. The platform offers much regarding content volume and management, delivery, promotion, and consumption. The Five Jars team is excited to make our contribution to a product that gives the whole Y-movement a long-term digital perspective.

Today, our team continues to support and provide maintenance for the core parts of the YMCA360 platform – content management system, video content distribution, live streaming functionality, and custom API development.