Somersfield Academy PTA
LiveA Bermuda school PTA swapped a Classlist page, a Jotform and card machines for one site the committee runs itself.
Ready in
About two weeks
Card payments
Straight to the PTA's bank
Door check-in
Works offline
Run by
The committee
01
The Problem
The Somersfield Academy PTA runs events, a shop and food days for the school. Before this site it did that with a free page on Classlist, a Jotform for Pizza Friday, bank transfers and card machines.
Its biggest night had a date on it: the 35th Anniversary Cocktail Party at the Hamilton Princess on 14 November, with eight ticket and sponsor tiers and a park-and-ride add-on to sell well ahead of time.
And the committee changes every year. Whatever replaced all of that had to be run by volunteers, next year's as much as this year's.
Buying gala tickets on a phone, with placeholder names. The card form is Authorize.Net's own page, so its box is left empty.
02
The Approach
Design came first, in three rounds with the committee. The first offered four directions. By the third, the anniversary filled the top of the home page and Buy Tickets was the loudest button on it.
Behind the public site is an editing area where the committee changes pages, events, prices and stock themselves. Publishing updates the public site about a minute later.
Card numbers never touch the PTA's pages. The card form is Authorize.Net's own, so the PTA answers the shortest of the yearly card security questionnaires, and the money goes straight into its own merchant account.
A committee edit going live. The one-minute rebuild wait is cut.
03
How It Works
For parents: Tickets are bought on a phone in a few taps. Each guest is named at checkout, so their ticket is waiting at the door, and the receipt carries a QR code for every ticket. The shop has sizes and colours with their own stock, and food orders go a term at a time, per child.
For the committee: The dashboard opens on the next event, with a sales bar for every ticket tier, the week's takings, food lists by class and a short Needs a person list for anything the site could not sort out itself. Refunds, part refunds and cash sales are all done from the order.
At the door: The guest list is saved on the volunteer's phone. If the hall loses signal, check-in carries on and catches up when the signal returns, and a ticket let in on two phones is flagged rather than admitted twice.
Privacy: Parents' details are handled under Bermuda's PIPA from the start. Allergy notes need their own consent tick, a card number typed into a message box is refused, and a request to be forgotten removes the person while keeping the accounts whole.
The dashboard as a sale lands, and the door with no signal. Sample figures and placeholder names, not the PTA's.
04
Auction Winnings
The gala closes with a silent auction run on AirAuctioneer. Afterwards the treasurer types each winner and their lots into the editing area and presses Send.
Each winner gets an email with a link to their own page, listing their lots and the total. They can add the card fee, 2.25% plus 25 cents, so the PTA receives the full amount, then pay through the same Authorize.Net form as every ticket.
A winner who paid at the party or by bank transfer is recorded by the treasurer instead, and their link closes. It went live on 27 September, ready for the gala on 14 November.
A winner paying for their lots, with placeholder lots and names. The fee is the site's real rule: 2.25% plus 25 cents.
05
The Result
The site is live at somersfieldpta.com, on the PTA's own domain, with hosting included and managed by dotbm. It was ready in about two weeks, with the gala still seven weeks away.
Parents pay by phone, the money lands in the PTA's own account, and the committee runs the site themselves, with fifteen plain-English guides for whoever takes over each job next year.
Before a real card went near it, it went through twenty rounds of review, including a rehearsed door night, and the last accessibility check found no issues across 124 page views.
Running events, a shop or payments for a school, club or charity?