NSAI’s Custom eCommerce Platform Meets Every Challenge

The NSAI website was built in an outdated, proprietary CMS that was not capable of handling their unique membership needs. The website was difficult to manage, and features were outsourced to other website installations so that NSAI could provide their services to their members. The only person on staff who could manage this inflexible CMS was their on-staff IT person, who was already overwhelmed with on-site needs and support. In addition to the specific technical deficiencies, the website also did not reflect the NSAI brand and mission or cater to its audience.

By creating permission-based management roles for the staff, the IT person’s responsibilities were delegated, allowing them to spend less time managing services and more time working toward tasks that suited their specialized skill set.

Membership due reminder emails automated the collections process, which has increased the amount of dollars rolling in on schedule and decreased the amount of time it takes to collect.

Harnessing Drupal’s entity API and the eCommerce suite of modules, we were able to provide a custom, inline editing experience for membership-type creation and management. The application works almost as another team member, automating dozens of processes and creating reports that the staff can work from to perform their daily duties for the Association, focus on growing their member base, and enhance their members’ experiences.

NSAI’s biggest challenge was membership credit distribution. The Executive Director’s challenge to Plan Left: “No one has ever been able to get these membership credits built correctly.”  With purchase of a standard membership, songwriters are awarded a set of credits. Some credits can only be used for certain services, such as premium education events. Other credits are cross-service applicable, but all credits needed to be controlled and editable through the CMS so that NSAI could grow and change their membership types as their needs changed.

Additional layers of complexity to this platform’s needs included credit expiration schedules, tiered levels of membership, alternative payment schedules, and additional credit purchases outside of those schedules that are available for purchase.

The new experience allows the eCommerce managers to create and manage memberships, and alter them as needed. Furthermore, memberships sold would not dynamically update when the existing memberships are sold, allowing NSAI to honor what is sold without fearing a breach in their agreements to members. eCommerce managers can also edit individual members’ credits if needed.

We implemented custom workflows for each type of event or service. For the online pitch events, we created a customized form that allowed NSAI to quickly and easily create these pages so members could cash in their credits to register for attendance.