Friends of Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites is a membership organization that partners with the State of Georgia to protect, preserve, and enhance the state’s treasured places. Back in 2007, after getting tired of keeping all of their data in spreadsheets and clunky Access databases, they recognized the need for a database to manage its donors and members. They chose CiviCRM because they had a limited budget, a volunteer willing to take the project on, and—most importantly—CiviCRM met all of their needs at the time.
Until early 2014, Friends of Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites had been managing their CiviCRM installation on their own, running their own upgrades and doing their own maintenance. While attending the CiviCRM User Summit in late 2013, Damon Kirkpatrick saw the importance of engaging a CiviCRM consulting shop and becoming more involved in the CiviCRM community. They became major contributors to the development of CiviVolunteer, and they retained the services of AGH Strategies to work on their custom development needs.
One of the challenges that Friends of Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites faced was making sure they could easily manage the CiviCRM access of their chapter leaders, who had varying technological skills and were located all over Georgia. The complicated part of this need was that they needed a permission for each chapter, since each of the 55 chapters would have their own chapter lead. If they used traditional ACLs with CiviCRM, they would need to create over a hundred different groups to manage access. While this is possible, it's unmanageable as new chapters are added or chapter leaders turnover regularly. When combined with groups for communicating with chapter members, the total number of groups would be overwhelming.
Instead, they asked AGH Strategies to build an automated permission system using some custom development plus Drupal roles: access is now based on fields in CiviCRM contact records. This made it easy for CiviCRM administrators to assign chapter leaders their permissions, kept their groups to a manageable size, and ensured that chapter leaders only had the rights to communicate with, edit, and create events and volunteer opportunities for their contacts only.
Friends of Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites has been involved with the development of CiviVolunteer, the second most downloaded extension for CiviCRM since the beginning. With over 6,000 volunteers at 55 different locations, they needed something that would help them manage both online volunteer registration and reporting back on actual participation. They were able to replace a separate system (with an expensive annual fee) with one that’s tightly integrated with their website.
Neither of these features were part of Friends of Georgia State Parks and Historic Sites original goals with CiviCRM. Rather, they were needs that arose when the organization grew and evolved. This is one of the many benefits of using open-source software like CiviCRM. Instead of having to migrate their current CiviCRM member and donor database to a new system that also manages volunteers or manage a completely separate volunteer database, they were able to invest in and improve upon the infrastructure that was already in place to meet their wishes.
