Published
2014-06-23 17:34
The Capital Area Greenbelt Association (CAGA - www.caga.org) is an all-volunteer, non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining and preserving the 20 mile Greenbelt trail that circles Harrisburg, PA. The trail was initially created in the early 1900's, as part of the national City Beautiful movement. The trail was created as a pedestrian-use only, paved road linking several of the parks around Harrisburg and surrounding communities. Unfortunately, during the Depression the trail fell into disrepair and was not restored until the 1990's. At that time, a small group of conservation-minded individuals rediscovered the trail and banded together to clear many decades of debris and overgrowth, and begin the work of repaving, weeding, fencing, and many other maintenance tasks needed to keep the trail safe for walkers, bikers, and joggers.
Although CAGA receives funding from federal, state, and local grants and donations, those funds are typically earmarked for large construction projects, or jobs that are too big for a small group of volunteers to take on, such as the current Safety Project which has identified several dangerous intersections and is looking at ways to improve safety. The day-to-day maintenance costs for lawnmowers and other equipment, gasoline, tools, plants, trees, seed, etc, comes from the membership dues of our several hundred members, and from our annual fundraising event (the "Tour de Belt"), an organized bicycle ride along the entire
trail.
Keeping track of our members, and registering the over 700 riders for the Tour de Belt, used to be done entirely by hand. Several spreadsheets were maintained, and depending on who helped out that year, one or several copies had to be merged into a master list, curated, and edited to create our membership renewal letters, and to mail the pre-registration packets. Mispelled, missing, and duplicate entries were a problem. The task of making sure only one letter or packet was sent to a household, when riders or members may have different last names, made things all the more difficult. Many hours were spent reconciling differences.
Several years ago, after migrating the CAGA public web site to WordPress, we began looking for open source membership administration software,
and found CiviCRM. We were able to easily import the spreadsheet data for our members, as well as several years of Tour de Belt rider registration data into the CiviCRM database. It did take a little work to clean up the data, but the job was made easier by using the built-in reports. Where needed, we codied some adhoc SQL, which was very straightforward, since CiviCRM uses a clean and consistent data model.
We have used CiviCRM for the past four years, and are very happy with the ease of use and maintainability. It is very easy to train new staff on entering and updating the member list and Tour de Belt registration data; this is important since the same volunteers are not always available to do the work each year. We are currently looking at ways to streamline the process of merging registration data that is entered into the BikeReg database. The API functions available in CiviCRM will make this task relatively easy.
We appreciate the hard work made by all the CiviCRM contributors, and look forward to the new features in upcoming releases, and hope to contribute back to the
project some day.
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