Small Nonprofit Goes Big Online

But as you poke around, you’ll find a series of hints that KCA really is a small organization. We were impressed with the “live chat” function that allowed us to chat online in real time with a KCA staff person almost immediately.

From what we can gather, our chat was actually with KCA’s director of development, who provided excellent, brief responses driving us to use its hotline number or visit key publications on the site — talk about access! The executive director even is listed as the webmaster.

So how does it do it?
It does that, largely, by plugging in a series of third-party software tools. If you watch the URL as you move though the site, you’ll see you’re frequently entering other secure servers and sites such as Z2Systems, Capwiz, Qualityoflifesurvey.net, kcachat.org and yellowbrickmall.com, to name just a few. If KCA has figured out how to get all of these separate software tools (and their databases) to talk with each other, it deserves a blue ribbon. If not, it’s likely constituents have to keep track of multiple passwords and profiles, and receive communications for, say, action alerts that look and feel different than they do for, say, the confirmation that they’ve registered for the conference online.