Has this ever happened to you?

Your club wants to advertise an event to other clubs by emailing the various club presidents—but you can't find an up-to-date list of the presidents' email addresses.  You want to contact another member who you met at the National Convention—but have misplaced his or her business card and are uncertain of the person's last name.  Your Zone Governor has requested a copy of your club's current phone list or roster—but by the time you're able to update the documents and mail off a copy, several members of your club advise you of a change to their contact info.  You suggest posting your club's roster on a website as a convenient location for member access—but most of your members are reluctant to have personal information casually available on the Internet.  You hope the National Office can provide you with current membership lists for any club across Canada—but you discover the official records are useless since individual clubs frequently forget to include National in the loop when submitting updates.

Yes, you want to…but arrrggghhh!  And guess what—you're not alone!

The ability to locate member and contact information within the National organization and the ability to efficiently update that information has posed considerable problems for some time now.  With information stored in so many different formats and locations, clubs not sharing very much information and the speed at which information becomes outdated, it's been impossible to create a secure and centrally located, easily accessible and maintained, National contact database.

The solution?

Primarily, a system, sponsored by the National Executive team, that allows contact information to be easily shared and updated, enables members to manage and update their own information and provides a number of reports and queries to eliminate low value add manual tasks (such as maintaining club rosters and generating census reports)—all wrapped up in a secure environment that lets each member control who sees his or her information.

At Canmore's National Convention, your Board of Directors approved recommendations presented by the National Communications System Project Team to fulfill this vision.  This completed the first phase of the project with high-level scope definition, funding in place, and competitive selection of Impact Blue as the technical services contractor.

With the guidance of National Communications Director Sharon Ward, the project team, consisting of CPC Sponsor Terry Clarke, CPC Project Manager Adrian Lomas, Impact Blue Project Manager Erik Brisson and Impact Blue Lead Designer Donovan Dillon, is already forging ahead.

Ultimately, clubs will be able to store information centrally with access gained through the existing National website; and have one spot to manage contacts via an online application. Members will be able to go online to update their own information. They will also be able to locate any other member or group of members and send them an email message—all without having to maintain a separate distribution list. With hosting provided by a special server, data will be kept secure and in the personal possession of each member or his or her designated club membership administrator. Users will have to log into the system and will only have access to certain data.

Sounds rather progressive, doesn't it?

Stay tuned to future editions of the Progression On-line for more information on the functions and features that will be available through this valuable project.

For detailed project information, see the project folder "Communications Management System" found in the Member Services section of this website.