American Atheists Turns Raw Data Into Real Relationships Using CiviCRM

American Atheists

American Atheists, Inc. is a nonprofit, nonpolitical, educational organization dedicated to the complete and absolute separation of state and church, accepting the explanation of Thomas Jefferson that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was meant to create a "wall of separation" between state and church.

 

CiviCRM is helping American Atheists take the next step in building better relationships with it's members.  Flawless membership signups, stremlined membership renewals, and extensive reporting capabilities are just a few of the features that have made the transition from a propriatary in-house database to CiviCRM worth time and effort of conversion.

 

Integration with the Drupal content management system has given American Atheiests the ability to give it's members added value without the headache of manual entry or overhead of maintining an in-house prorpriotary system.

Organizational focus
Education
Faith
Government
Legal Advocacy
Organization type
Educational
Non Profit

Background

American Atheists wanted one thing: Usable data.

 

The in-house system wasn't giving them the results they needed and after several attempts to move to other less sophisticated systems, the organization found CiviCRM.

 

Once the data was normalized and imported, their number one goal was met.  

 

Since then, they've discovered that CiviCRM has the power to take over for several expensive, and disconnected, SaaS products and provide core-level integration with all of their member data and plan to systematically deploy those features to their members.

Challenges

The largest obstical in deploying CiviCRM was in combining and cleaning several different databases and data sources.  

 

The key to getting what was requirquired from CiviCRM was in the preperation of data to be imported and was by far the biggest struggle.

Solution

Several other CRM's were evaluated, from smaller member management systems to "best of breed" solutions.  CiviCRM offered the best combination of features and control, combined with the amazing support of a large community, made it the best option.

Functionality

The most important feature of CiviCRM was it's ability to manage and maintain membership data and provide a solid reporting platform.

Project images (click to enlarge)

As with any project of this nature, this project required key members in the clients organization to work closely with our team at FlashingCursor.

From a technical perspective, the project required a top notch DBA, an experienced Drupal Developer and someone with the ability to analyse the clients existing systems and their needs in order to bring everything to a successful project deployment.