Revolutionizing Member Engagement and Fundraising: A Multidomain CiviCRM Solution

American education communication is one of the most popular ways of attracting donors to donate funds to educational institutions across the country. Although such a notion is more common when it comes to colleges and universities, our client embarked on a journey to elevate alumni communication and fundraising within school districts.

Their vision was ambitious yet clear: to establish a digital platform that would involve alumni in collaborating on fundraising campaigns that support various school initiatives, from facility renovations to financing local sports teams.

Project Tasks and Challenges

Throughout the developmental phases, the Agiliway development team encountered several major challenges and objectives:

• a pre-existing system lacking a clear vision of implementation specifics from the client;
• importing alumni contacts from school district administrations and integrating them into the system.
• incorporating social networking features the client needed, as they aimed to expand and scale the solution;
• adding role management feature;
• the client’s proposal to create separate instances for each state, leading to potential management and scalability issues.

What Solutions Were Suggested?

Since the project is quite complex and involves large piles of data, the suggested solutions were as follows:

• deploying a multidomain CiviCRM on AWS. The client’s initial thought was to deploy one CiviCRM for each school. However, such a step would prove to be extremely impractical as it would entail thousands of separate CRMs that require a lot of support time. Therefore, the solution was to have one instance – one CRM – many schools.
• consolidating multiple schools under one CRM instance for simpler support and maintenance. The Agiliway team suggested a solution involving proportional growth of system instances based on contact volume, utilizing AWS infrastructure and templates for faster and smoother deployment.;
• group segmentation and categorization were optimized to accommodate a growing network of schools, enhancing scalability and cost-efficiency;
• transitioning to CiviCRM enabled integration with social media platforms, fulfilling the client’s goal of creating a Facebook-like environment for alumni engagement in groups and/or chats and fundraising. Before switching to CiviCRM, the client was using quite a costly tool that basically covered the client’s needs; however, it did not allow us to connect to social media. This was one of the reasons why switching to CiviCRM was the best solution.
• user profiles were tailored to facilitate future categorization and filtering, allowing targeted communication and information access;
• the infrastructure leveraged serverless architecture, Kubernetes, and WordPress CMS, ensuring robustness and flexibility.

The modernization of the alumni/fundraising platform allowed the client to realize their vision of bringing together community engagement in school life while optimizing operational efficiency and scalability. The implemented solution lays the foundation for continued growth and innovation in alumni communication and fundraising initiatives.

Who Else Can Benefit from Adopting the Solution?

Beyond schools, different organizations can leverage the multidomain CiviCRM solution to enhance their operations and achieve their goals. Nonprofits and NGOs, professional associations, community groups, religious institutions, sports clubs, scout groups youth organizations, etc. can all benefit from adopting CiviCRM into their daily operations. The main advantages of CiviCRM are:

• advanced donor management;
• donation tracking;
• planning and coordinating events;
• schedule meeting;
• communicate with your peers, friends, and other donors, etc.

The multidomain feature of the CRM allows them to manage multiple branches efficiently, allowing centralized data management and improved communication across the organization. The platform’s social networking features enable it to create online communities and facilitate discussions.

Overall, the multidomain CiviCRM solution offers a versatile platform that can be tailored to the specific needs of various organizations, enabling them to streamline operations, enhance community engagement, and achieve their mission more effectively.

If your organization is looking for a solution that will help you manage your operations, contact our CiviCRM experts for more details.

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