CLIENT:  North Carolinians for Home Education

NCHE over the past thirty years has sought to protect, provide and promote the interests of quality home school education within the state of North Carolina. The home school community has grown and changed, and NCHE has developed many ways to address these changing needs.  As home school advocates, NCHE has proven to be effective in shaping public policy and rally educators to support families.

IDENTIFIED NEEDS:

NCHE was limited by an inadequate, legacy, system that wasn’t able to consolidate membership transactional data into a unified fundraising platform.  Staff were forced to manage web content, product sales and membership acquisition and membership renewals from disparate systems.  This placed a heavy burden on staff to track and reconcile these functional demands.  Because most of the member engagements were occurring online, NCHE needed a robust, web-giving, platform that could consolidate these day-to-day functions into a donor management database as well as give members access to their profile to manage their subscriptions.

WHAT WE DID:

In the discovery phase we determined Drupal, in combination with CiviCRM, to be the right applications to meet the needs of NCHE.  It was a key requirement to have memberships organized into “household membership types” and provide donors access to their subscription and giving profiles.   The relationship between Drupal and CiviCRM enabled a seamless synchronization of donor demographic data and user account administration.  

The next obstacle we faced was to migrate legacy data over to the new platform.  This was multi-step process that took several months to develop the conversion strategy, test, cleanup data, and fix bugs.  

In addition to custom configurations and data conversion work, we developed their Drupal site.  Instead of resourcing one of our designers to develop a custom theme from scratch, we set up a sub-theme and customized a free template.  This significantly reduced costs and allowed us to focus on the bigger database challenges.

OUTCOME:

NCHE has been fitted with a custom Drupal/CiviCRM platform that is maximizing membership promotion effectiveness by consolidating two modern architectures into a unified donor management system thereby decreasing inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.

KEY SOLUTIONS:

Druapl 7, CiviCRM 4.2.9, Drupal Commerce