Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
West Monroe Partners
Reva Kahmi
ARCS Foundation (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) provides financial awards to academically outstanding U.S. citizens studying to complete degrees in science, engineering and medical research. Established in 1958, 14,000 scholar awards have been provided by ARCS Foundation at 53 institutions.
ARCS is composed of 17 chapters across the United States, who report to a national chapter. The strategic goal of the ARCS Foundation was to create a premier dynamic website supported by an effective and efficient database to meet the day to day operational needs of the organization at the National and Chapter level. To meet this goal, Promet Source worked in conjunction with West Monroe Partners to select software, collect requirements, design and implement ARCS' CMS and CRM.
About the project
The strategic goal of the ARCS Foundation was to create a premier dynamic website supported by an effective and efficient database to meet the day to day operational needs of the organization at the National and Chapter level.
Promet streamlined workflow by providing ARCS the ability to securely input, store, access, update, and archive all information (data, reports, images, full motion video, sound) relevant to the present and ongoing operations of the ARCS organization both at the National and local ARCS Chapter levels
Promet implemented Drupal CMS and CiviCRM in a customized implementation where governance is split between the central national chapter and independent regional chapters. The users have a single sign on capability between chapters. Promet implemented a multi site implementation for Drupal and CiviCRM and created data warehousing and reporting capabilities.
Services Performed:
- Drupal and CiviCRM implementation
- Information Architecture: Defined the content to be accessed on the website and how to best organize the information to ensure ease of use and navigability
- Design and Theming: Created a consistent theme and format for each page reflecting the organizations mission, goals and objectives
- Streamlined event registration, gift giving and other identified processes by providing the ability to perform secure financial transactions online through a separate third party vendor that will process the transaction
- Created the levels of security necessary to ensure each Chapter’s data is secure as defined by National with input from local Chapters
- Implement the physical database resulting from the database and application design phase of the project
- Content Migration: uploaded and scrubbed the current identified data from the National SQL Database and the various local Chapter data repositories into the new database as well as all identified current National and local Chapter data
- Developed training materials for identified users
- Provided training to all identified users based on job responsibilities and access levels
- Determined the operational maintenance and procedures necessary after the database has been implemented including data backup, recovery and archiving
- Conducted regularly scheduled Project Status meetings with the ARCS Implementation Task Force and the Steering Committee
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was selected at the content management system for several reasons. ARCS is run as a loosely federated group of autonomous chapters, who report to a national chapter. This national chapter also undertakes certain financial duties associated with ARCS not-for-profit status. Members from the individual chapters also serve on the national chapter. This connected model is uniquely suited to Drupal’s multi-site capability. This allows all chapters to share a codebase, but maintain their own content and database. Therefore, code could be managed centrally, as opposed to separate sites. Another reason for choosing Drupal was because of its integrations with civicrm. ARCS maintains a database of members and students who receive scholarships. These and others are easily captured and maintained.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We looked at several different CRM packages besides CiviCRM. We ultimately chose it because of the tight integration with Drupal. We knew that the user base in Drupal would be a complete but changing subset of CiviCRM contacts: members would be assigned administration and content editing roles, so it was advantageous to have an integrated user and contact storage solution. This would allow us to import contact into CiviCRM for membership and data management, while giving the user the ability to control who was creating and editing data. The additional CiviCRM modules, Member Sync and Roles Sync aided in this endeavor. Ultimately we wanted a simple solution which would allow members to control their website content as well as access accurate member data easily and quickly.
