In my first year with Golf Canada in 2021, having just gotten comfortable with the organization’s incredible dataset on golf being played in Canada, I pitched the obvious: Why don’t we spin up a large number of servers in the cloud, crunch through the data and gift each member of Golf Canada with their own shareable graphic of the golf they played that year? The go-ahead was quickly given and a furious three week effort resulted in the 2021 #MyGolfYear campaign, a simple but well-received surprise to Golf Canada members.

In 2022 and 2023, with more time for planning and exploration, the #MyGolfYear campaign returned, with the basic summary values such as the Total Rounds, # of Holes, Distance Played and Best Round again being featured, and now adding 15 possible ‘achievements’ a golfer could earn due to their play that year.

For technology, #MyGolfYear is powered by Laravel Horizon running on Amazon AWS Cloud as a fast, parallelized queue to process the millions of scores entered annually by hundreds of thousands of Golf Canada’s membership, with MailChimp and Mandrill used for e-mail and OneSignal for push notifications to provide members with their annual stats package.

With an e-mail open rate in excess of 64% and thousands of shareable graphics making the rounds on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, #MyGolfYear had popular success, but added commercial success via sponsorship with JOURNIE Rewards in 2022 and BDO Canada in 2023 and onwards. To me, like Spotify Wrapped, it is the definition of making use of an organization’s existing assets in a new (heavily ‘inspired by’) way to surprise-and-delight one’s own customers while also creating a saleable new asset.

With over 125,000 golfers using the Golf Canada Mobile App on a weekly basis, Golf Canada had a very successful app that was nonetheless severely limited in its ability to surface messaging and communicate with the userbase of the product. To provide a reason for Canadians to open and use the app outside of strictly recording their scores and increase engagement with their friends, Golf Canada and its partners, I proposed in 2022 that social network-style features be implemented in the next release of the Golf Canada Mobile App.

In late 2022 and early 2023, I architected and led the development of the friend system, home screen news feed, the ability to attach photos and videos to a score posting or content upload, and push / e-mail notifications about your friends’ activities in the Golf Canada Mobile App. The API and backend in use is Laravel, with Laravel Horizon utilized in particular as a fast, parallelized queue to create cached score and content posts that can be instantly retrieved and displayed in the home screen feed of golfers. To notify golfers about friend requests and the activities of their friends, Laravel Horizon queues and executes 1:1 transactional push notifications via OneSignal and e-mail via Mandrill. Finally, Voyager provides Golf Canada staff with a simple-to-use web backend to administer and moderate content on the platform.

Since release in August 2023 through the month of December, over 9.8 million posts have already been viewed via the home screen feed, 136,000+ new friend requests have been made and accepted, and over 30,000+ photos and videos have been uploaded via the mobile app. Critically for Golf Canada’s partners, a 400% increase in banner ad code loads and a 300% increase in ad impressions has resulted from the introduction of the home screen news feed to the app.

With mobile app development partner Mirego on board, I led this project internally at Golf Canada, soliciting and organizing requirements, architecting and developing a Laravel-based API and backend to drive content, data, images and video to the mobile app, interfacing with and implementing integrations with the PGA (ShotLink) and the LPGA (R2IT) for real-time leaderboards and tee times, Ticketmaster for mobile ticketing, VenueNext for mobile ordering of food and beverages, Intellitix for RFID wristbands, and Trak-4 to enable real-time player positioning display in the mobile app.

During the two weeks of the live tournaments, the Golf Canada Mobile App was utilized by over 17,000 event attendees, and $65,000 CAD in incremental revenue was generated via mobile ordering of F&B. The Laravel-based backend is dynamic and can be utilized in future years to display and run further tournaments without the need for further development efforts or even technical ability.

Read It Offline is a Readability client, too, allowing users to save articles to the PlayBook directly from a PC or Mac’s browser.