Our Clients: BC Dairy Association Nutrition Education Program

BC Dairy Association (BCDA) runs an ongoing Nutrition Education program for schools and teachers complete with course materials, videos, and numerous workshops each year. And it’s not all for the benefit of young children either: BCDA offers workshops for teachers in elementary, middle and secondary schools, as well as for universities and health professionals.

The point, says Wendy Kwok, a program coordinator at BCDA, is to make sure kids and adults all over British Columbia understand the role nutrition plays in their lives. BCDA’s dietitians and nutrition educators present their workshops in schools, offering teachers resources, information, and education materials to take back to the classroom and pass on to their students.

This beneficial and important program is managed using a Filemaker database built and maintained by Oak Bay Softrends. Kwok says the database lets them handle things like scheduling the 45-60 workshops they hold each year, as well as manage communication with teachers and the ordering of materials for classroom use. And that’s not all, says Kwok. On a daily basis, more than 15 staff at BCDA take advantage of another important aspect of the database: contact management.

Oak Bay Softrend’s database, built in 2009 and expanded through the years, tracks all contacts valuable to the entire organization. Naturally, basic contact information is recorded, but BCDA also uses the database to keep track of when the person is contacted and about what. It’s a key part of making the organization responsive and helpful to those it serves.

Kwok says these days they’ve got things working really smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that when she was recently contacted by another organization looking for the same kind of resource, she was happy to recommend Oak Bay Softrends: “They are easy to work with, and they know Filemaker inside and out. And they are really nice guys.”

After more than a decade of working smoothly together, BCDA should know!