Every recreation department knows the feeling: a to-do list that never gets shorter, part-time staff who need answers fast, and a registration system that needs to keep up with how families shop for activities. On a recent episode of the Parks & Tech Collective podcast, Diana Clayson, Superintendent of Recreation at Buffalo Grove Park District in Illinois, talked about what changed for her team after moving to Amilia's SmartRec platform a little over a year ago.
Clayson oversees a wide range of programs at Buffalo Grove, from preschool to before-and-after school care to youth sports. Before the switch, updating something as simple as a registration date across dozens of programs meant touching each one individually.
That's no longer the case. Clayson pointed to mass edit as one of the features that's changed her day-to-day the most:
"Mass edit is one of my favorite features. I can't tell a lie."
The result: staff spend less time fixing details across hundreds of activities, and more time on the programs themselves. Clayson described checking discount settings across the entire youth sports category in a single pass instead of opening each activity one by one.
Part-time staff noticed the difference too. Clayson said feedback from pool and concession stand staff has been consistently positive:
Parents don't just compare recreation registration to other recreation registration — they compare it to smooth shooping experiences like Amazon. Clayson said that expectation now shapes how Buffalo Grove's system works for the families using it.
"Everybody wants that Amazon type shopping experience where you just make it easy for them."
With activity search, filters, and suggested-activity features, families can find age-appropriate programs and get nudged toward things they might not have thought to look for — a soccer family pointed toward an upcoming baseball season, for instance. Clayson said the easier that process is, the more likely families are to complete a purchase, which shows up directly in participation and revenue.
It's easy to gloss over the migration itself, but Clayson didn't. Buffalo Grove began the process in January and opened live registration in July — a longer timeline than some, by her own account, and one that included department-specific training sessions (front desk staff have very different questions than finance), biweekly check-ins with their Amilia contact, and dedicated help migrating existing data.
A year in, Clayson still runs into tasks she only does occasionally and doesn't remember step-by-step. Her first stop now is Cecelia, Amilia's built-in AI assistant, before she calls her account manager or the support team.
"For me, Amilia's Cecelia chatbot is like the colleague that does and remembers it all. She's like a best friend!"
Diana said working through those questions herself — with Cecelia's guidance — also means she retains the steps better the next time around, rather than depending on someone else to walk her through it again.
None of this changes why people get into parks and recreation in the first place. Clayson, who moved into the field from early childhood education twelve years ago, still keeps her office by the preschool entrance and drops in on classes when she can. The technology underneath a department doesn't replace that connection to the community — at its best, it just clears more room for it. Less time spent on passwords, manual edits, and one-off system questions means more time available for the parts of the job that drew people to recreation in the first place.
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