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Hi, I'm currently looking at transferring a fairly limited static site to Joomla and there's a few things I'm still trying to get my head around.  Maintaining a distribution list for email newsletters being one example.  My organisation is membership based (a trade union) but we are also interested in communicating with non-member supporters and potential members.  Having such people sign themselves up on the site is fine, but when it comes to our members my head starts spinning a little. 

I'm slightly concerned about creating a duplicate database on the site of our offline membership database, and then trying to keep the two in sync.  The best solution I can come up with is to load the names and email addresses of members into the site's database and then ensure our administration people advise me of every amendment they make to the offline database (new members, resigned members, new email addresses etc) so I can update the site's database.  I'd also like to think there's a way to tag people as members or non-members and to avoid duplicate records (i.e. members who also sign themselves up via the site).

I'm not sure if I'm being all that clear, but thought someone in this forum might have had similar issues and have some thoughts on it.

Cheers,

Jason

Jason,

Ah, this is a problem we've worked with our non-profit and association clients many a time.  The struggle to keep an online and an offline database is very difficult, and for most of our organizations we provide them with the pros/cons for both, and rarely ever do we say that a hybrid is the best choice.

Really, you've got to think about going towards a small CRM system, like the open source packages by CiviCRM or Democracy in Action.  These will essentially take the place of your offline database, and both can now integrate directly into your Joomla Web site so that members can sign up, change their information, see a directory of other members, all in the Web site.

It's definitely a challange, but really think through the roadmap of going to an online database.  I think you'll find it opens up a world of options for your org.

Best,
Ryan