By Monarch Digital on

Overview

As they describe themselves, “The Porsche Club of America celebrates the finer things in life. We desire the comfort of good friends and good conversation, and we praise to a fault the world’s finest automobile.”

The PCA was seeking a website that would be the new hub of communications and growth for their large community of Porsche enthusiasts. Like the car itself, the website had to provide all the high performance features that the community needed wrapped in a theme that was both familiar and exciting.

Visit pca.org →
Porsche Club of America
Why Drupal was chosen: 

First and foremost, the PCA is a membership organization. Drupal provided the infrastructure and track record of implementing complete and customized membership management websites more cost effectively than proprietary solutions.

However, Drupal also provided the capability and flexibility to implement many advanced features needed by the club such as technical Q&A, customized classified ad management, and national and regional membership reporting.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Experience

The PCA selected Monarch Digital to develop their new website as Monarch had experience in developing complex membership sites, most notably for the Mercedes-Benz Club of America.

Goals

The original goal of the PCA leadership was to have a website that would be a more effective frontend to their proprietary LAN-based iMIS membership management system. However, after seeing demonstrations of other Drupal membership sites, the organization realized that they could effectively run many critical functions of the club on the Drupal website.

Theming and Identity

The club recently went through an arduous process of redesigning their popular print magazine, Panorama. After sampling prototype designs from three designers, the club selected the design that most closely matched the newly-redesigned Panorama magazine - PCA’s award-winning monthly publication. Members easily recognized the new theme and immediately knew they were visiting the right site.

Data Conversion and Cleansing

Monarch Digital converted and performed data sanitization on memberships from the LAN-based iMIS system into the new Drupal site. Monarch built aggregated queries and cached tables to share data to a number of external apps and reporting systems.

Membership and More

The site is packed with custom functionality designed specifically for the club.

Membership:

  • Visitors can join the club online, with the registration process requiring a valid Porsche VIN (Vehicle Identification Number).
  • If a visitor doesn’t own a Porsche, they can join as a Quest member, giving them the opportunity to shop the classified ads for their own Porsche.
  • Members can login, renew, update their profiles and receive member-only benefits on their member dashboard.

Reporting

  • National leadership can run up-to-the-minute membership reports across the nation, region, or for local regions.
  • The national office can find members, update their profiles, along with renew and manage their memberships.
  • Regional and zone leadership can view and download membership reports specifically for their area of responsibility.
  • PCA leadership can view historical monthly membership reports for planning and trending.

Classified ads

  • Members can place ads, respond to ads, contact advertisers, and mark ads to watch. Ads can appear online, in the magazine or both.
  • Monthly, Panorama staff pulls an export of the current ads and directly feeds the file into InDesign for publication.

Technical Q&A and more

  • Members can submit questions to technical experts in the Porsche community.
  • Members have access to an inventory of online art and forms.
  • Members can submit racing and insurance registrations online.
  • Members can request replacement membership cards.

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Membership Entity
Views (for Drupal 7)
Panels
Views data export
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Membership Entity

Central to selecting Drupal was the ability to manage all member processing on the PCA website.

Views

Flexible reporting is essential for a large and growing membership organization. PCA’s inventory of reports and the ability to download CSV files through views provide all the information required to manage the lead at the national, regional and local levels.

Panels

Members, leadership and administrative staff are each directed to a panels-based dashboard after login to provide the most important information on the site for each role.

Views Data Export

PCA needed pull reporting data in large quantity. A normal view would hit memory limits or page execution timeouts when attempting to retrieve the quantity of data needed. The Views Data Export module, and its batch processing of exporting views data, is essential to providing PCA with the data they need to run the organization.

Sqlsrv

Monarch migrated extensive membership data stored on SQL Server. Sqlsrv allowed Monarch to efficiently migrate this data into the new Drupal site on Linux.

Community contributions: 

Monarch Digital created the Membership Entity family of modules and continued to enhance them based upon the needs of PCA, other clients and the issue queue.

Organizations involved: 
Monarch Digital
Team members: 
Rick Nashleanas
draenen
Bartuc
jswainst
davidcsonka
Project team: 

We would like to thank the many members who volunteered to review comps, test and generally assist in this project.

Especially, the PCA Executive Counsel for providing vision for the project and the staff at PCA National Office during development and implementation.

Sectors: 
Community
Non-profit