Mobilizing Americans with Disabilities
Disability Power and Pride
Disability Power & Pride works to unify the disabled community to better advance in the political and social spheres. The organization's priorities include promoting disability leadership in the federal government and hosting cross-community events. In the words of founding Board Chair Tony Coelho, “Our Power propels us forward as our Pride connects us in community.” The organization uses CiviCRM for event registration and management, managing their donors and accepting payments, and to manage their database of people that they want to endorse or promote for federal employment opportunities. This later use of CiviCRM is unique. The profiles that are tracked and maintained are extremely detailed - there are 100's of fields recorded on an individual's experience, background and politics. All of this information is collected online and maintained within CiviCRM.
Background
Lattice Group proposed using the CiviCRM (www.civicrm.org) constituent relationship management system (version 3.3) to handle Disability Power & Pride’s membership management, fundraising and event management. Integrated with Drupal, CiviCRM provides a turnkey solution for both Disability Power & Pride’s short-term needs as well as its long-term goals. For example, reservations, payments, and reporting for events such as the annual gala can be managed directly. Both online and offline membership, pledges, and donations are tracked and reported from its centralized contact database. CiviCRM's advanced features such as personal campaigns with personalized contribution pages and the ability to manage “bonus” items at different giving levels, allowed the development of functionality to support canvassing, petitions, and grassroots lobbying.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges with this project had to do with the level of detail of the information that is collected. This was a challenge because there are certain fields, for example, where there are literally hundreds and hundreds of options. While this was managed primarily via brute force, CiviCRM provided an infrastructure backbone to manage these fields.
Solution
The biggest reason CiviCRM was chosen was that Disability Power & Pride wanted a drupal based website. One of their board members had done a significant amount of research and in their opinion, drupal was the most accessible and friendly platform for people with disabilities to use of the major CMS's that are available. Since CiviCRM intergrates so closely with drupal, this decision made sense. Other CRMs were not really evaluated due to this reason.
Functionality
The ability to have different contact types for fields to distinguish between various types of people and profiles (they key information Disability Power & Pride keeps track of) was a key functionality of why CiviCRM was selected for this project. Close integration of CiviCRM with drupal was also key, as well as the basic functionalities of what CiviCRM offers.
The team consisted of six members: Disability Power & Pride's membership manager, two other members of their board, (these individuals provided all of the data and content for the site as well as the business side), as well as a designer, site builder and project manager.
