New Farcry Site: North East Alumni Relations

The NEAR group is an informal consortium of alumni relations directors from 13 small colleges in the northeast United States. To better facilitate communications among the member institutions, we've launched a suite of services for their use on their new website, http://www.nearweb.org/

ARAMP

Our Alumni Relations Assessment and Metrics Program platform was the driver for the whole project. Created for our friends in PCUAD, ARAMP is a survey and data analysis toolkit used to assess the performance of an alumni association within the context of a community of practice. In essence, comparing you to your peers (in this case NEAR) on a set of agreed-upon data points and evaluating your progress based on a scoring/weighting schema. Helpful features include the ability to send email to any peer within the system, view commentary on successful programs, run customized reports and build a custom dashboards of selected data points.

The system was implemented using a healthy combination of Flex and ColdFusion (word to the geeks: Remote Objects rock!). Performance is greatly improved over PCUAD's version of ARAMP (10x...no lie) as is the user experience. The decision to re-implement ARAMP in Flex really was a no-brainer. We have the ability to do better data validation, richer charts and graphs and build a cleaner UI using Flex than with CF/Ajax/CSS/JS. We'll be rolling this new version out to PCUAD later this spring and other communities of practice as the opportunity arises.

Farcry

No organization seems to be truly complete without a functional web presence. We implemented one for them powered by the popular, open-source Farcry CMS. They are in the process of dressing up the site content following a brief web conference/training session. Uptake has been swift, and it's hoped that the CMS will minimize the amount of time required to update the site.

Galleon Forums

Naturally, not all conversation is structured or belongs within ARAMP, so we rolled out the web forum software that Ray Camden has released for community use. We've worked with Galleon before and like it an awful lot, so thanks, Ray! Now you can count "advancing the profession of alumni relations" among your lifetime accomplishments.

One neat feature of note: Dayne devised a nice bit of code that implements a single sign-on (single session) between ARAMP and Galleon, reducing an irritating possible double login effect that could have happened in the transition from the Flex to the CF environment. The users of the system will never know it's there, which was exactly our intent!

We were able to implement a LOT of functionality using open source software, leaving most of our time to work on the Flex/ARAMP implementation. The combination is very powerful and I hope to see us use it more over time.

So if you're curious or want to know more, drop me a note on our site contact form or AIM:scrittler. I'll be happy to demo the system(s) to you!