CiviCRM is used not only for member and donor management, but also event ticket sales and class registration
The Richard Hugo House
Richard Hugo House is a center for the literary arts that supports writers of all ages and backgrounds and promotes the creation of new writing. Hugo House nurtures writers and readers and brings innovative writing classes to people from every background. The Hugo House had a collection of disconnected data systems (one for donations, one for member management, one for student registration, a 3rd party service for email management and another for ticket sales). The goal of the project was to bring as many of these systems' functions together into CiviCRM as possible. We were able to consolidate all member and donor management, as well as student and class registration, and email management into CiviCRM, as well as some fundraising and special event ticket sales.
Background
Reduce duplicative data collection and management. Consolidate data into a comprehensive system so that exporting and importing from one system to another was not required on a regular basis. Improve usability of all data systems and class listing and registration system for both staff and students.
Challenges
Data had to be imported from no less than 4 disparate systems, including historical contribution data, membership data and event (class) registration data. We also needed to offer discounts based on membership for class registration. Class registration itself was a bit of a challenge using CiviEvent due to the fact that there are ~40 classes per term, and registration opens at different times for members vs non members.
Solution
CiviCRM was chosen because of its integration with Drupal. The organization already had a Drupal website. CiviCRM's open source licensing was also a factor, as was its featureset.
Functionality
Membership management and donations were as important as the class registration system.
Three staff people at the organization were on the project team to provide guidance on feature requirements and data structure. CivicActions team members included Gregory Heller (primarily responsible for all system architecture, configuration, data import and training) and David Numan (responsible for pre-import data standardization).
