Connecting, Engaging and Tracking Members with CiviCRM

The French American Chamber of Commerce

The French American Chamber of Commerce – New York (FACC-NY) is part of a national network of FACC chapters that promote business between France and the United States. The FACC–NY is comprised of diverse member businesses and offers a range of programs, providing growth opportunities to businesses and their communities.
Cividesk implemented for the FACC NY a membership management solution based on CiviCRM with a fully customized member portal, membership directory which includes the option for a member to contact directly another member and more features.

Organizational focus
Government
Organization type
Association

Background

The FACC New York needed a central database to manage members, events (we host more than 40 events per year), services (we provide services such as J1-Visa, Career services and Co-work).
As we are part of a national network of local chapters we also needed a platform that allows us to provide a common membership directory where any member at any point in time can contact a member from any of the other participating FACC chapters. We also needed to track these “member to member” introductions so we can measure member engagement. 

Challenges

While we were implementing CiviCRM, we were also working with another service provider creating a new Drupal website.
Although the process proved quite challenging given two vendors, Cividesk integrated CiviCRM into this new website, which offers FACC members the option to login and have access to a member dashboard with actions such as renewing their membership or contacting other members who have registered for the same event. We went live with our website and CiviCRM at the beginning of 2019 and four other FACC chapters use this same platform, which gives members access to a common membership directory.

Solution

CiviCRM offers the highest degree of flexibility for our needs and fully integrates into Drupal.

Functionality

We are using extensively the membership module to recruit new members, track our existing members and measure our members engagement with our organization. 

We use smart groups to segment our database and target our communication. These groups are also used as mailing lists in CiviMail and we use the Mosaico extension extensively for our emailing campaigns.

We use reporting as well on a weekly basis, and Cividesk created a customized membership report to track the number of introductions, events, jobs posted, email and phone conversations, intern hosting and other engagement activities. This report offers a snapshot of our member activity at any given time.Cividesk developed another report that provides us with a set of key performance indicators associated with our events, such as the number of Americans and French attending, industries in which they work, as well as conversions, where non-members that attended an event then join our chamber. 

We use the event module to manage event registrations and communicate with the participants before and after our events. Since we are hosting more than 40 events per year, we need to rely on a robust event management system. We are now looking at the possibility to use the new extension CiviMobile so we can optimize the check-in process at events by using a QR code.

Developed by

Cividesk

Cividesk provides affordable CiviCRM services for nonprofit organizations including implementation, training, data import, hosting, maintenance and support. We are headquartered in Denver, CO but also have a presence on the west coast in CA, and in India in order to optimize support for our customers in various time zones and to answer our customer’s needs for software development and customizations.

Cividesk was founded in 2011 on the premise that CiviCRM users will need on-going support and best practices sharing to fully realize the potential of this incredibly rich software. Over the years, Cividesk has grown to become one of the leading Software-as-a-Service providers for CiviCRM.

Our service provides you with a fully configured CiviCRM. We take care of all the technology behind the scenes and are always available to answer any questions you might have. No surprises. Hosting, maintenance, mentoring and unlimited customer support are bundled into a fixed monthly subscription so you can budget your expenses in advance.