How do build a huge community with a non-profit budget?
According to some claims, nearly 40% of the United States population owns at least one firearm for the purpose of employment, hunting, self-defense or collecting, and Pennsylvanians make up a significant portion of that statistic. Setting aside the politics of the issue, that is quite simply a massive constituency, and one that desperately needed organization.
Launched in 2006, the site was originally an online discussion forum aimed at providing a space where Pennsylvania gun owners could share knowledge and experience on being safe & responsible. Since then the site became formally incorporated as a non-profit advocacy organization and has grown to have over 30,000 registered users and serve almost 4,000,000 page views each month.
How has PAFOA withstood such massive growth over the years since it’s inception? Simple, they turned to Qurve for help.
Integrating Diverse Technologies
Like any grass-roots non-profit organist, PAFOA has to accomplish a lot with a limited budget. As a result, PAFOA’s technical infrastructure is a mix of free, open-source and custom web technologies that Qurve developed, setup and integrated.
- A custom content management system developed by Qurve to handle the main public-facing website of the organization
- A purpose-built wiki-style reference library for housing archives of relevant statutes and case law for visitors
- A vBulletin discussion forum implementation that makes up the heart of the organization’s grass-roots outreach and organization
- A WordPress blog installation that acts as the organizations news and press-release system
- A custom Google Search API front-end that aggregates visitors searches across each of these diverse systems
Each of these different systems are integrated to complement each other such as having news from the blog fed directly to the forum or showing the names of forum members who have donated prominently on the main website.
Technology Infrastructure
At PAFOA’s scale it is no longer possible to utilize your every day hosting provider which is why PAFOA contracted Qurve to set up their co-located hosting environment running across multiple load balanced web servers. Qurve’s experience in setting up, managing, and optimizing distributed hosting environment was responsible for a 50% reduction in server response times after the transition.