AlumniUAM manages their Alumni ecosystem with CiviCRM and Drupal

The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), one of the most prestigious Universities of Spain, manages the alumni ecosystem with a platform based on CiviCRM and Drupal

Back in 2014, the UAM presented their new AlumniUAM program. AlumniUAM aims to promote the relationship between their 170,000+ former students. Their goal is to keep the contact with people that have been involved with the University and that have contributed to its excellence. The new AlumniUAM program has more than 1,200 members.

The UAM needed a system that could help with the contacts and membership management. Among other requirements, AlumniUAM was looking for a system that could:

• Manage all the contacts of the Alumni ecosystem
• Manage membership types with different durations, discounted prices and different payment methods
• Empower the relationships between the contacts of the program
• Register all the contributions received such as membership fees, donations or event fees
• Have a public area and also a private membership section where the users could access the member directory and get in touch with other alumni
• Integrate with their academic system and with their Identity management system based on LDAP
• Offer social media functionalities for the membership private section like:
  • Private messaging
  • Creation of groups
  • Creation of self organized events

Another important part of the project was designing a new responsive, modern looking website that could integrate with the back office platform.

The project

After evaluating different solutions, AlumniUAM decided iXiam’s proposal of using CiviCRM as a CRM, Drupal as CMS and the Drupal Commons distribution for adding social media features to their site. The project started in the early days of March and was delivered at the beginning of September. It went public on October 1st, 2019. The project had 3 main components:

• Public website: with a complete design from iXiam’s design team, the public website is based on Drupal. The site is responsive and allow the user to access to public content like News, events or make donations for the projects funded by the UAM.
• Private area: the private area combines some social features of Drupal Commons, like private messaging, following users/contacts, creation of groups or events. All the information of the private area is integrated with CiviCRM. The user can update their own details, create collaborative groups and invite other users to join that group. Maybe the most used feature of the private section is the Member Directory which will show all active members (using CiviCRM membership status) that explicitly allowed to show their information in the directory
• Back office section: The system relies on CiviCRM for managing all the contacts, memberships, contributions, communications and relationships. AlumniUAM will also use CiviCRM for presenting the recurrent direct debit charges of the membership fees using SEPA standard format. Working together with UAM’s IT department, our team integrated CiviCRM with the Identity Management System. This integration allows to manage the users from the corporate LDAP based directory. Last but not least we installed our recently developed RedSys payment processor module (funded by Amnesty International Spain) allowing AlumniUAM to receive online contributions using the most extended online Payment Processor of Spain.

 More information: https://alumni.uam.es/