Case Studies in Drupal^® & CiviCRM^®

Case Study #4 - Green Party of Aotearoa - New Zealand

The Green Party has been the largest third party in NZ politics for most of the last decade, and for periods back as far as the early 1970s. They achieved parliamentary representation in 1999 and after the 2007 election had 9 Members of Parliament, 4-5,000 members and c. 50,000 contacts. The Party has 9 Provinces, over 50 branches, some of which are split across Provinces, and contest elections across all 67 electorates (which do not align with either Provinces or Branches). Prior to adopting CiviCRM the party and parliamentary units had a range of systems for managing members, donations, contacts, campaigning, media and advocacy.

The Green Party policy states:

• Development of IT must be socially responsible and sustainable.
• The use of Free and Open-Source software should be encouraged.

What They Did

CiviCRM was adopted in 2007 (version 1.7). This was encouraged in part by the work that had been done developing a voter canvassing Drupal module by the Canadian Greens. A switch to Drupal was undertaken as a parallel project. A Party database was set up using CiviCRM and online donations, memberships and event registrations were instigated.

The Greens have over 100 different issues that they put media releases out about. These were reconstructed as a checkbox custom data field, and Smart Groups were built for each of these, for use when sending out media releases via CiviMail.

The highly complex ‘access control’ requirements of the party necessitated the development of an alternative approach to the use of ACLs in order to provide a more easily managed, highly granular system. This approach has now been incorporated as a hook (something that can be utilized by developers to extend CiviCRM) in to core code.
For the election campaign in 2007, a look-up function was developed that meant as new contacts were added to the database, they were checked against a table containing the Electoral Roll, and links were created where matches were made. ‘Soft’ matches were also recorded.

The Results

In the 2007 election campaign, the Party made extensive use of online fund raising and greatly exceeded previous online income. The membership renewal has been streamlined with more online renewals occurring. As of May 2009 the Greens are still using 2.0 on Drupal 5 and therefore have not yet benefited from the many features that became available through the 2.1 and 2.2 releases. An upgrade is in progress.

What They Learned

In a complex organization such as the Greens, training is often going to be a limiting factor, as well as the need to develop more in-house superusers. New features in CiviCRM have caused some rethinking about usage of custom data fields, particularly in terms of the use of CiviMail for media releases. The new options for both nested groups, and Drupal Organic Groups suggest that a more time effective approach may be possible.