Case Study: Streamlining Membership Access and Public Outreach for the American Chiropractic Association

## Project Overview

The American Chiropractic Association (ACA) is the largest professional organization in the United States representing doctors of chiropractic. Its mission is to inspire and empower its members to elevate patient care, advance the profession, and advocate for health and wellness.

ACA engaged FatLab to build and support two mission-critical websites: one serving its members with secure access to resources and advocacy tools, and another aimed at the public to promote chiropractic care and connect patients with providers. These websites are central to ACA’s communications, membership engagement, and public awareness strategy.

## Technical Implementation

### Member Website with CRM Integration and Secure Access

ACA’s primary website serves thousands of chiropractic professionals across the country. FatLab built a secure WordPress environment tightly integrated with the organization’s CRM—Cobalt on Microsoft Dynamics. Key features include:

- **Single Sign-On (SSO):** Members log in using their credentials synced from ACA’s CRM, ensuring accurate permissions without manual account management.
- **Custom Role-Based Access:** We developed a fine-grained content access system that assigns roles based on committee, council, or board memberships. This enables targeted content delivery and internal communication within the association.
- **Dynamic Directories:** Member directories reflect real-time CRM data and are filterable by committees, councils, and other groupings, ensuring that stakeholders can find each other efficiently.
- **Secure Resource Delivery:** Private documents and advocacy tools are gated behind authenticated access, secured by member role and status.

### Public-Facing Directory: HandsDownBetter.org

To promote chiropractic care and connect patients with qualified providers, FatLab developed and hosts [handsdownbetter.org](https://handsdownbetter.org), a consumer-focused site. Key features include:

- **Real-Time Geo-Search Directory:** Patients can search for chiropractors by ZIP code. Directory rankings can be adjusted based on sponsorships or other CRM-defined statuses.
- **CRM Integration:** Provider listings are updated nearly in real time using data from ACA’s central CRM, ensuring that only current, qualified members are shown.
- **Mobile-Friendly and Performance-Tuned:** The site is optimized for fast public access and supports SEO goals for ACA’s public awareness campaigns.

## Security Measures

Both sites benefit from FatLab’s hardened hosting environment, which includes:

- Cloudflare Enterprise WAF for protection against bots and exploits
- Imunify360 for real-time malware scanning and auto-cleaning
- SSL certificates maintained at multiple levels (server, CDN, firewall)
- Daily backups, weekly updates, and multi-layered access controls
- Role-based admin access and audit logging

## Ongoing Support

FatLab has supported ACA continuously for over four years with:

- Fully managed WordPress hosting
- Real-time performance monitoring and uptime alerts
- Weekly plugin, theme, and core updates
- Content management assistance and on-call support
- CRM and API maintenance and updates
- Training and documentation for internal stakeholders

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