“Without Civi, we’d be broke,” says National Association of the Deaf, Web Support Officer

Published
2014-04-25 11:37
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The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) is the nation’s premier civil rights organization of, by and for the deaf and hard of hearing in the US. NAD is not a high revenue organization, so they need to allocate their financial resources intelligently. CiviCRM has allowed NAD to utilize technology to improve their processes without incurring a high cost. As Andy Foster, Web Support for NAD, wrote: “if NAD was to use Constant Contact, we would be broke by now”.
 
The CiviCRM functionality mostly used by NAD are:
1. Event Management
2. Membership Management
3. Email Communication
 
Event Management: NAD uses CiviEvent to host conferences, workshops, trainings and their Biennial Conference.
 
The 2012 Biennial Conference was the first time that NAD used the full CiviEvent functionality. This feature improved the whole registration process as it was the first time that NAD used the online registration with the ability to accept credit and debit cards. The confirmation email with details about the registration, hotel, flight, car, and different optional events signed up during the conference, definitely streamlined and made this process much more efficient. 
 
Just imagine how long it would take for an admin person to have to sort through all this paperwork manually! It’s time consuming to have to go through each registration manually, one registration averages an hour to process. The 2014 Biennial Conference will be taking place in July, so this year, NAD is planning on having staff members walk around during the registration with a mobile tablet to help members register on-site and to ensure 
their membership is current. 
 
Membership Management: There’s about 5,000 members and about 26,000 emails in the CiviCRM database. The challenge in this area has to do with cleaning and re-evaluating 4 years worth of data that was never maintained. 
 
Email Communication: NAD segments their email groups based on the task force they belong to, as well as their needs and interests. At a minimum, the general group, which consists of 26,000 people, receives at least one email/month. 
 
CiviCRM has allowed them to use technology at a fraction of the cost than if they had used other technology available in the marketplace. It also gives them the ability to use the ever-changing technology to become more efficient in their daily operations.