Launching a Mobile App and Custom CMS for Brave Trails Family Camp

First Glance

Brave Trails Family Camp is a weekend-long adventure filled with exciting activities, LGBTQ pride, and all the fun of a quintessential camp experience. It's designed to be a place where campers can make lifelong family memories. Brave Trails wanted to enhance this connection and develop a mobile app to make it easier for families and campers to interact.

The Challenge

Brave Trails wanted to modernize and improve the camping experience by providing attendees with an intuitive and pleasant mobile experience.

Brave Trails met with Sunrise Integration and discussed their requirements. They needed a custom app that would allow them to share events, display meals, show staff members and help campers to connect with other attendees. We knew that we had to design a simple, convenient app for family members of all ages to enjoy.

On the backend, one of the requirements was a means for easily managing and maintaining the app data. The Brave Trails staff wasn't able to create code so, they needed a CMS to help with data entry for events, meals and campers.

The Sunrise Integration mobile team went to work on the project to have it ready for the February 2023 Family Camp session.

The Solution

Our team gathered all the details and ideas about the desired use case through different meetings. We started with a discovery meeting where we reviewed features, timelines, key points, design ideas and more. The discovery process allows our team to understand the needs and user personas who will use the Brave Trails app. It also allows us to understand the administrative needs of the Brave Trails team. This particular aspect is often overlooked by clients so it's important for our team to stress the need for proper administration.

Once the discovery sessions were complete, we used that information to form a project plan for the Brave Trails stakeholders. This involved creating a technical roadmap for the developers and a discovery document for the client. These documents provide details surrounding the timeline, deliverables, technology used, staff members assigned to the project and more.

Once the discovery is complete, our design team takes over. Our talented in-house UX and UI designers gather critical user personas, style guides and research to create wireframes and prototypes for the mobile app. We presented a few different design directions to provide Brave Trails with some options for the UI. They ultimately choose a clean and light design showcasing some eye-catching camp images.

Again, the most important aspect of the project was the administration site. This is a standalone portal where the Brave Trails team can manage all aspects of the mobile app. The admin site provides direct control over events, images, users and schedules. All changes are automatically reflected in the mobile app making updates a breeze.

The Outcome

Our team is always excited when we successfully develop and launch a project! We were able to meet all of the stakeholders’ expectations and launch the app live in the App Store. The Brave Trails app was completed in January 2023 and pushed to the App Store in time for the February 2023 camp sessions. 

Our development team was excited to leverage our tech and mobile expertise to help launch and maintain the system. Everything from app development, design and managed AWS hosting was provided in-house by Sunrise Integration.