The USA has more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations. The majority of the do-gooders are small – often purely volunteer-based with annual revenues below $100k. One of these organizations is the California Association for Play Therapy (CalAPT). Their mission is to help a community of therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, etc. with an understanding of play therapy and its effective practice through outreach, training and research. Special emphasis is to support the developmentally appropriate treatment of children’s mental health.
CalAPT hosts frequent events and training classes for therapist’s accreditations. The organization struggled with a mix of applications, including a WordPress website as well as high hosting fees. The IT stack was hard to maintain and did not integrate well with the accounting tools. Finding volunteer resources to manage this complex environment was an ongoing challenge. Nonprofits have a mission to support the public good. Spending large amounts of money on systems and the IT staff to support the technology, reduces the ability to spend money on helping others.
A few months ago the CalAPT team decided to consolidate their tools and move the Odoo Enterprise V16. Key objectives included:
1) Consolidation of multiple disparate tools
2) Allow for ease of setup and operations so non-expert volunteers could manage the tools
3) Reduction in cost
4) Quick access to organizational information for the board of directors and volunteers.
The Results:
Using Odoo, a new website and system was ready for testing within less than two weeks. Minor Studio modifications allowed the team to streamline their event ticketing process and tailor certificates based on accreditation rules.
The system went into production in June 2023. One challenge was the domain DNS setup based on limitations with the existing registrar. The Odoo support team quickly resolved these issues within 48 hours with suggestions on better configurations.
Mailchimp emails were quickly replaced with Odoo’s built-in email marketing tools. The new system is faster, and much easier to maintain than the old WordPress site. New events and associated website landing pages are created and maintained by volunteers. Ticket sales are handled via Stripe payments and reflect automatically on the accounting side. Ticket sales includes the ability to manage member and volunteer discounts as well as price reductions based on order volume.
Course participants can log into the portal and manage their own registrations, courses, and certificates.
Since the go-live in June the system was upgraded from 16.2 to 16.3. Due to changes to the certificate templates in 16.3, some minor effort was needed to modify the custom templates. The system is now running with the upgraded 16.3 user interface and the volunteers embraced the new look and feel immediately.
In summary, the implementation was a success in terms of scope, maintainability and cost. The Odoo support team was highly responsive with a few issues encountered along the way. CalAPT is now able to scale at a better rate, manage events more effectively, and spend more money on their mission versus administrative cost.
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