Using CiviCRM for a Membership Organization
Gateway Off–Road Cyclists
The Gateway Off-Road Cyclists (GORC) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation dedicated to advocacy, design, construction, and maintenance of multi-use trails in the Greater St. Louis area (Missouri and Illinois). As an International Mountain Bicycle Association (IMBA)-affiliated club, they organize social activities such as trail builds, group rides, organized trips, and local events.
GORC's existing site was built with Dreamweaver, and needed an upgrade. Although IMBA offers site templates to member organizations, the proffered templates were expensive and lacked desired membership management features. GORC also had a vision for an easy-to-update trail condition function on the site, which is a great feature for all site visitors. They also wanted to leverage CiviCRM to manage their membership process, handle event registration and manage volunteer hours on trails.
Background
As defined by the client, the goals of a new GORC site included:
- Improve GORC’s image with fresh website design.
- Build the site on the latest Drupal platform, version 7.
- Map, configure and implement the CiviCRM module for Drupal so GORC can better manage member accounts, renewals, volunteer activities/hours, and provide event registration on their site.
- Design and implement a new trail conditions feature so that authorized users can provide up-to-the-minute trail conditions around local parks for visitors to gorctrails.com.
- Expand awareness for off-road cycling, trail maintenance and trail advocacy in the Gateway area.
- Increase memberships, sponsors, and donations.
Knowing member management would be a key component of the new site, with CiviCRM being the backbone to power it, one of the first areas we examined was GORC’s membership process, from new member signup to renewals. We mapped how existing membership data would be migrated from their existing database, and documented how CiviCRM would be configured to track memberships, volunteer activities/hours, sponsorship details, donations and event registration.
On the Drupal side, we evaluated what modules would be used, readied the OAuth Facebook integration, and installed the base theme off of which to build the GORC theme (in this case, Omega). During this stage, we also took inventory of their current content, media, and other assets that would be used in the new buildout.
Challenges
GORC is a volunteer managed organization and our primary contact worked a full-time in a family owned business. Most of his availability was at night and on the weekends. The primary volunteer also committed to importing the data himself while Spry Digital provided guidance throughout the process.
Solution
GORC was already on Drupal and it intergrated nicely with Drupal.
Functionality
From a CiviCRM standpoint, membership, activity and event membership were all key functionality that had to be delivered. On the Drupal side, a custom trail conditions section was important too.
Project images (click to enlarge)
Site build by Spry Digital for Gateway Off-Road Cyclists
Sheila Burkett, CiviCRM guru
Ken Moire, UX/UI & Graphic Design
Dennis Bland, Graphic Design
Julia Koelsch, Development Lead
Rachel White, Development
Phil Cryer, Development
Jen Wilton, Project Management
Matt Hayes, Client and Data Mapping, CiviCRM & Drupal Configuration
