The CRM, the job board, and the magazine all work inside one website staff can run

A national website that depends on systems it does not own

The National Peace Corps Association is the alumni organization for people who served in the Peace Corps. Its national website is where alumni give, read WorldView magazine, look for work in international development, and find events and affiliate groups.

Very little of that lives in the website alone. Donors and members are kept in Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT. Job listings come from GlobalJobs.org. Members talk to each other on a separate community platform.

A content manager on NPCA's staff looks after the website. If those pieces do not line up, that person feels it first: a donor is sent to a form that looks like some other organization's, a job seeker finds listings that closed weeks ago, and the content manager spends the week copying the same news into one system after another.

The right tool for every job, and none of them talking to each other

NPCA had recently left an all-in-one platform, a story of its own, and chosen a strong tool for each job. That choice has a usual cost. The tools know nothing about one another, and the gaps get filled by people.

Gifts belong in Raiser's Edge, where the development staff work, and nobody wanted to type them in a second time. Job listings change every day, and nobody at NPCA should be posting them or taking them down.

Then there was WorldView. A magazine wants its own look, and most organizations would give it a separate website. That means a second site to maintain and a second place for the content manager to log in.

We connected each system at the point where a person would be doing the work

Giving happens on NPCA's own pages and lands in Blackbaud. The donation forms come from Raiser's Edge and load inside NPCA's pages, so a donor never leaves the site. The development staff see the gift in their CRM without anyone entering it again.

The job board keeps itself current. We wrote a plugin that pulls listings from GlobalJobs.org and lets a job seeker narrow them by region, experience, sector, and location. Listings refresh on their own, so what a visitor sees is what is open, and nobody at NPCA touches a listing.

The magazine lives inside the same website. WorldView has its own masthead, its own typography, and its own page sections, and it still runs on the same WordPress site. The content manager publishes a magazine story the same way as a news post, and there is one site to look after.

Staff publish once. The site's news feed is shaped to suit the member community platform, so an article published on the website shows up there with its image and a short summary.

One website to manage, and the other systems keep themselves current

Today the content manager works in one place. A news post and a magazine story are published behind the same login. A donor gives without leaving NPCA's pages, and the development staff find the gift where they expect it. The job board turns over every day with nobody at NPCA involved, and a story written for the website reaches the member community without being posted twice.

Each connection is also a seam. If NPCA replaces one of these outside systems someday, the change happens at that one connection and the rest of the website carries on. Our part is to host the site, keep it updated, and keep the connections working as the systems on the other end change.

The same association also runs a network of volunteer-led chapter websites.