The Alliance for Catholic Education at University of Notre Dame is a nationwide program that forms teachers and school leaders and provides research and broad support for Catholic schools across the country. ACE seeks to ensure that none of today’s social and economic hurdles will prevent any child from experiencing the gift of an excellent education. ACE operates very much like a nonprofit in that it needs to steward its financial resources very carefully in order to maximize impact.
Why did you choose CiviCRM?
ACE has been using Joomla, an open source Content Management System for the last 5 years. When the time came to select a Constituent Relationship Management (3 years ago), we gravitated to the open-source community due to our positive experience with Joomla and the relationship we had forged with that community. CiviCRM really stood out because it is an affordable platform that provides endless opportunity for customization.
What is the most helpful feature in CiviCRM?
The most helpful feature for our team is CiviCRM’s ability to deploy user-maintained tracking for our graduates around the country. ACE graduates usually move a lot the first 5 years after graduation since the two-year teaching program tends to send them to parts of the country they may not have chosen on their own. Whenever there’s any type of communication with the students and graduates, whether it’s a birthday card, Christmas card, or mass email, we always include a request to update their information in a pre-populated form. We’re also able to integrate the platform seamlessly with our website, which allows us to track user activity on the site, event participation and more.
What is the most important benefit you’ve seen with CiviCRM?
CiviCRM is a tool that gives ACE accurate and updated information in a world where it is difficult to hunt people down once they start moving across the country. This is extremely important from a benefaction activity point of view since it gives us the ability to tell potential benefactors what our graduates are doing and how they’re impacting the Catholic school system. Ricky commented: “This is a testament to the work we’ve accomplished over the years. We can accurately say that 70% of graduates are still involved in education, the majority still serving in a Catholic school.”
You also developed CiviCRM Mobile, can you tell us more about this application?
Computer Science majors from the University of Notre Dame worked with ACE to develop this mobile application. It’s been used by our staff whenever they are on the road visiting current teachers and graduates because it gives them the ability to update teachers’ and graduates’ information instantly.
You can explore the Demo site: http://civicrmmobile.cloudaccess.net/ . We are interested in partnering with others to improve its functionality. Please email Ricky Austin at raustin1@nd.edu if you have questions or have an interest in partnering.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Open source software is of great value to us and to the under-resourced schools we serve. If deployed on a large scale, it can change the game for the future of these schools - not only because of the beneficial financial model, but also because it allows isolated communities to share information and best practices. ACE is always looking for ways to incorporate open-source approaches so that professors/faculty/researchers/benefactors can collaborate and share ideas whether its with a piece of software or a body of research.
It has been amazing experience to be part of the CivCRM community. ACE truly believes in giving back because the more people contribute towards “the project”, the better the end product will be for everyone.
Written by Linda Pagano based on an interview with Ricky Austin, Coordinator of Communications at the Alliance for Catholic Education.
