YWCA of the Greater Triangle

The YWCA of the Greater Triangle (YWCA) is a nonprofit organization established to assist and provide services to members and citizens through a host of programs targeted to empower women, promote racial justice, increase wellness, develop youth and support seniors. Prior to implementing CiviCRM, the YWCA did not have a unified method to track clients (known as "participants") and program services. The data was stored in multiple Excel files and paper forms, leading to a high degree of duplicated and inaccurate data.

The YWCA project team was assembled as a volunteer initiative with the primary purpose of addressing the error-prone paper-based system of participant tracking. We selected CiviCRM as a solution for many reasons, including:

Excellent client (contact) management functionality;
Extensive GUI-based administrative functionality (custom data field management, user and site management through the Drupal core, etc);
Additional modules that could be implemented in the future to handle membership and contribution tracking;
Case management functionality for tracking services provided to clients;
Highly configurable custom data fields;
Built-in advanced search capabilities (including the Search Builder query tool), and;
Reporting capabilities.

The we customized CiviCRM in the following ways:

Performing translations in order to change the built-in CiviCRM "language" to a YWCA vocabulary (i.e. "participants" instead of "contacts" or "individuals", "program" instead of "case"). Please see the wiki page for instructions on implementing translations (note: view attachment for further documentation).
Building custom reports for statistical summaries and reports for case activity data. Please see the wiki page for instructions on building custom reports (note: view attachments for sample report files - MembershipDemoScreenShot.JPG and MembershipDemographics.php).
Adding custom javascript to enhance usability of New Contact and New Activity forms. The YWCA is currently using CiviCRM as an internal database with no external/client access.

The YWCA is currently using CiviCRM as an internal database with no external/client access.