AAEE is the state branch of the National Association for Environmental Education. Rather than being satisfied with the national association’s turnkey website template, AAEE worked with Z-Com Creative to develop an entirely custom user experience.

The AAEE website is structured around “Projects,” categories of activity within the association. Registered website users can join a Project, thereafter subscribing to updates posted at the Project by the Project’s editors – new file uploads, blog and news posts, even new forum topics. The site manager can quickly deploy new Projects going forward without intervention from us, and manually manage the order in which they appear on the homepage (if at all – they also use the Projects functionality to handle internal board of directors communications). Arizonaee.org is built to last.

The other major custom functionality at Arizonaee.org is its Resource Database. AAEE registered users can submit five different kinds of educational resources. Resources that are tied to an address appear on a clickable Google map. All resources are searchable by various criteria. The registered user community then self-regulates the resource database content, flagging entries as “inappropriate” as well as ranking and commenting on them.

The website project also includes membership management services via CiviCRM integration. CiviCRM handles new membership purchases, donations, and all membership information (join date, dues paid). AAEE’s website now handles all event registration (transferred from Eventbrite) and all mass-email services (transferred from Constant Contact).

Z-Com Creative has provided ongoing training to the association’s volunteer site managers. This robust, community-driven site is now entirely volunteer-managed.

We installed Google Analytics at the outset, and can easily provide data for future fundraising and grant-seeking efforts by the association.