Tour of Madison

The problem

Tour of Madison brings hundreds of international students together with hundreds of local volunteers for a single day. Every student needs a seat in a car. Every car needs a driver and a reader to deliver the tour script. Every car needs a host home to land at. And every one of those assignments has to survive the last-minute cancellations that always come.

Run on spreadsheets and group texts, that math gets away from you fast. One student dropping out on the morning of the event can quietly break three other assignments, and nobody finds out until people are standing in a parking lot.

What I built

A web app that holds the whole event in one place — open in any browser, on any phone, with nothing to install. That was deliberate: you cannot ask four hundred people, many of them new to the country, to download and set up an app the week they arrive.

Registration for two very different audiences

Students and volunteers sign up through flows built for their own needs, with confirmations going out by both email and text so nobody is left wondering whether their spot is real.

Matching

The heart of it. The system assigns students to cars, pairs each car with a driver and a reader, and places every car with a host home — accounting for capacity, roles, and the constraints that make a given pairing work or not. Reassignments are a few clicks rather than a spreadsheet rebuild.

Broadcast messaging

Organizers can reach exactly the group they mean — all drivers, one route, every student who hasn’t confirmed — without maintaining parallel contact lists.

Multiple routes and scripts

The tour runs several driving routes at once, each with its own script. Readers see the right one for the car they’re in.

QR check-in

Arrival is a scan, so organizers know in real time who is present and who still needs chasing, instead of reconciling paper lists after the fact.

Survey feedback

Post-event surveys close the loop and feed into planning the next one.

Why it matters

The measure of a tool like this isn’t features — it’s whether the people running the event spend the day with the students instead of with a clipboard. Tour of Madison runs on software I still maintain, which means each season’s lessons make it into the next season’s version.