NfP Case Study 1

A professional association had acquired a "complete" association management solution to manage their membership, events etc. Its office-based facilities were indeed quite complete, reflecting the product's maturity. It was also reputed to have the ability to handle data to and from the web so that members would be able to subscribe, maintain their own contact details, book events etc.

As it turned out this was proving very difficult to realise. The web supplier had made strenuous efforts to implement the necessary web forms but the interface to the association management system was proving unworkable.

We were brought in to perform a quick assessment of the situation. It was clear that this interface was the crux of the problem. It was also important to implement event registration as that was one of the key requirements of the original project. We put a project in place to do this, making use of our exisitng event management toolkit.

We first had to wait for the interface to be built (it turned out not to be complete) and get it working. On testing, this interface was found to be unreliable so we worked with the vendor to get that put right; this turned out to require a redesign but they got it working in the end. We then completed the event booking system and took it live.

Since then we have built several other web-based tools around the association management system including specialised member search and profiling tools.

We also assisted with the management of two other major projects: a web redesign and replacement of hosted servers and support services.