Submitted by Mizi on October 19, 2015 - 09:33

The Salvation Army Echelon, the official young adult auxiliary of The Salvation Army, is the product of an idea that begun in Dallas, Texas in 2010. What started out as a small junior women’s auxiliary meeting monthly at private residences is now a rapidly-growing, nationally branded organization boasting more than 300 diverse members, female and male, ranging in age from 21 to 35, and hailing from universities around the country. Together, this group seeks to mobilize the next generation of The Salvation Army’s volunteers, donors, supporters, advisory board and council members both in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and across the nation through fellowship and networking, donations and fundraising, and service and volunteering

The site was originally laid out by a freelancer and shortly after launch Skvare was engaged to provide additional functionality, hosting, maintenance, support, and training. The aim for Echelon was to find a sustainable web presence for the number of rapidly growing chapters and host them all within one website.

The initial implementation of CiviCRM started with basic functionality: contact records, manually-created contact groups for every chapter, though lacking any organization as to contact’s membership or specific categorization principles. With only a couple of chapters set up, there was no clear direction for the future scalability or management of the chapter pages or its members.

During the project discovery process we learned that every local Echelon chapter has specific interests and needs. Some wanted to track memberships only, some expressed the desire to send out newsletters to different audiences, and others just wanted to set up events or recruit volunteers.

First, Skvare made it possible for relevant content to be displayed in a sophisticated and accessible way while allowing branding and appearance to be maintained consistently for all chapters with minimal technical expertise. Skvare created a flexible toolset for handling content displays that serves current needs while allowing for new functionality and scalable growth.

The initial contact management issue emerged quickly - categorizing chapter contacts in a way that one chapter admin can access and edit only local contacts and cannot send out a newsletter to the wrong group of contacts or delete any other contacts than the ones belonging to the chapter. Skvare had set up proper roles and permissions, grouped contacts based on chapter membership and geographic location, and refactored the ACL’s (Access Control Lists) to segment the access, editing, and deletion of chapter-specific contacts. The chapter administrators have limited technical training and this solution was the first step to allowing access and ownership of the chapter data. Contact segmentation and proper permissions also allow each chapter to reuse the same collection of reports that display only results from the local chapter. The reports allow each chapter quick access to summaries and underlying details of their membership, event registrations, donations, and more in-depth information about their membership base.

The next challenge we faced was when a chapter desired to provide its members an event registration discount. That functionality already exists within the CiviDiscount extension, however, the local chapter members do not have passwords or accounts set up on the site. Therefore, we could either provide an event registration link with a discounted ticket price, or force the members to go through an account setup process.

To address this challenge Skvare had delivered a solution that allows members to enter their name and email into a short form prior to registration. With Drupal’s CiviCRM webform integration we were able to verify the entered information and validate membership, then automatically redirect the user to a pre-filled event registration page with the member discount already applied - all in one simple step.

The fact that this was a step in the right direction is also proven by  the client feedback:

"I would say that overall, one benefit of CiviCRM (or our website in general) is that it gives us credibility as far as being associated to the Salvation Army and as being 1 of several chapters nationwide. Beyond that, its enabled us to gather attendees and volunteers for our meetings and service events. The biggest benefit so far is probably the ability to allow people to register through the website for our paid events. Before this, we were using individual event pages on myevent.com.

Finally, one feature that I'm excited about expanding our use of is the calendar. It will be very beneficial to have all of our meetings, events, volunteer opportunities, etc etc listed in one central location where everyone can reference it."

Nowadays Echelon’s interests are shifting towards volunteer collection for the upcoming Christmas events. We have installed the CiviVolunteer extension and we will be holding a training session on volunteer management.

Using a single database system across all chapters was an adjustment for everyone from Echelon involved, but with knowledgeable consultation and training this adjustment was a positive and progressive experience.

Skvare continues to be a part of the support and training process as well as taking the role of a trusted  business advisor and counselor for the next steps as we are actively communicating with Echelon members and chapter administrators in order to make the site more active and accessible. It is a constant work in progress as every week we are discovering new ways of how to use CiviCRM for growth of our chapters.

  AttachmentSize Echelon.jpg796.85 KB echelon-sign_0.jpg266.54 KB Case studies and user storiesCiviCRMDrupalMarketing and PromotionSustainability