Powerful, flexible class and conference registration for a leading non-profit capacity-development organization.

CompassPoint

CompassPoint pursues its mission of strengthening non-profit organizations through a wide array of workshops and a large annual conference. CompassPoint's old registration system was a closed-source, proprietary platform that was not evolving along with the organization's needs, so CompassPoint turned to CiviCRM. Building on CiviEvent, Giant Rabbit worked with CompassPoint to identify which of the organization's registration and donor/participant tracking needs could be met by CiviCRM out of the box and which required custom code. Giant Rabbit configured CiviCRM to meet many of the organization's needs and then developed a significant new set of features, the Multiple Event Registration system, to allow CompassPoint users a high degree of flexibility in signing multiple users up for multiple events at once (which was a must-have feature for an organization whose constituents are often large organizations where a single staff person will register many people at once). Once the system was operational, Giant Rabbit seamlessly migrated all current data and future registrations from the legacy system into the new system. Since launch, Giant Rabbit has continued working with CompassPoint to add new features to the system.

Organizational focus
Education
Organization type
Educational
Non Profit

Background

To replace a legacy closed-source registration system with an open-source platform that allows CompassPoint to: - access and control its own data - take advantage of new features coming from a growing community of developers - customize their own features when necessary.

Challenges

The biggest technical challenge was replacing a core component of CiviCRM with code that radically changed the workflow. It required careful planning to cut deeply enough to make the necessary changes, but not so deeply as to make it hard for the organization to upgrade and stay current with new versions of CiviCRM as they arrive.

Solution

CiviCRM began with a set of features that were very close to CompassPoint's needs, and the openness of the platform allowed Giant Rabbit to fill in the gaps. CompassPoint was further attracted to CiviCRM because of its robust development community that will continue to offer new features, and grow with the organization's use of the platform.

Functionality

In addition to the normal suite of CRM functions (donations tracking, etc.) provided by CiviCRM, the event registration components of CiviEvent were critical--including robust mechanisms to receive payments, issue refunds, etc., as well as export tools to provide reports for integration with the organization's finance team.

Project images (click to enlarge)

The Giant Rabbit team involved in the project was led by Senior Project Manager Anthony Nemirovsky, with the participation of partners Daniel Heath and Peter Haight. Development was provided by Peter Haight and Adam Wight, with assistance from additional contract coders and the Giant Rabbit QA team. On CompassPoint's side, Ben Felsing, IS Manager, coordinated a far-reaching effort to gather input from stakeholders throughout the organization, including finance, program staff, and marketing/outreach.