A membership management system for the Friends of Chichester Harbour.
The Friends of Chichester Harbour is a registered charity, formed in 1987 to sustain and improve the environment of the harbour for the benefit of both people and wildlife. It has a large and varied membership. They approached us to help them build a new membership management system.
The existing offline computer system required a lot of administrative effort by the charity's volunteer staff, and the Trustees were keen to find a way to manage and communicate with their members and to allow the members to manage their membership and payments online.
Available off-the-shelf systems did not give them the flexibility they needed and, in particular, did not make it easy to manage both tech-savvy and technophobic members, nor allow membership contributions to be easily combined with donations in a single transaction, or make it easy to import existing membership records.
The team team—pair programming for almost the entire project—produced a technically innovative and highly modular solution using Node.js, Sails, Browserify and the React-like framework virtual-dom to create a hybrid between a single-page webapp and a normal Web-based application.
The team was able to respond quickly as the requirements continued to change throughout the early stages of the build, by first developing a light-weight and flexible framework, which they were then able to use as a platform for the finished product.
A beautiful and easy to use customer relationship management system, built mobile first and offering a blazingly-fast user experience on both desktop and mobile.