The Haven Club runs professional training courses for both members and non-members, generally from its premises in London.

Its main website and membership systems are built around Drupal and CiviCRM. But training had gradually become detached from that environment and was being promoted and managed separately.

That created a bigger problem than simply having courses on the wrong website.

Event creation, promotion, registration, reminders, fulfilment, attendance, follow-up and reporting had all become fragmented. More importantly, the club was losing much of the value that comes from connecting training activity with what it already knows about members, prospective members and previous attendees.

So we decided not to treat this as a migration project.

Instead, we used one training course as a way of rethinking the complete event lifecycle.

What this case study covers

The series follows that course from the moment somebody decides to run it through to the point where the organisation can understand what happened afterwards.

Along the way, we look at questions such as:

• How should a course be created and who owns the underlying data?
• How do you publish it without duplicating information?
• What should the booking journey look like for members and non-members?
• How should confirmations, reminders and joining instructions work?
• What should happen when someone attends, cancels or does not turn up?
• How should previous participation influence future communications?
• Can training become part of the journey towards membership?
• What should management actually be able to report on?
• Where should automation help, and where should people remain in control?

This is also a practical technology case study.

We will show how Drupal and CiviCRM can be used together, where configuration is enough, where custom development is justified, and some of the technical approaches behind the finished workflow.

Separate technical articles will explore individual subjects in more depth, so the main case study can stay focused on the decisions and reasoning rather than becoming a development diary.

The objective is not simply to build a better events system.

It is to show what happens when you start with the organisation, the people and the journey — and then make the technology support them.