Working with FAAN
Established in 1991, the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) is dedicated to its mission of raising public awareness, providing advocacy and education, and advancing research on behalf of all those affected by food allergies and anaphylaxis. Its membership now stands at close to 30,000 worldwide and includes families, dieticians, nurses, physicians, school staff, and representatives from government agencies and the food and pharmaceutical industries.
Like many associations, FAAN must effectively manage thousands of member records. "Prior to Euclid's ClearVantage, we used a system that focused primarily on accounting [Great Plains]," says FAAN's Director of Information Technology, Debbie Copan. "Our old system was not very membership friendly and required a lot of physical data entry. Finding, extracting, and updating member information was quite tedious. Creating even the simplest of reports required us to export and manipulate our data manually. We soon realized that we needed a more powerful method of managing our information. With its clean-cut, user-friendly interface and its ability to effectively convert and manage all of our information in one centralized database, ClearVantage easily beat out its competition, and it has served us well since we implemented it in February of 2004."
FAAN attributes heightened staff productivity and a larger membership base to the capabilities that ClearVantage has provided the organization over the last several years. "ClearVantage really gives us more breathing room," notes Copan. "For example, the software allows us to easily create pre-designed templates when we are creating new product information to put up on our website or when we are promoting a new event—cutting out the time-consuming manual input and design that we were once accustomed to. In addition, since implementing ClearVantage, we have seen a dramatic increase in our online subscription rate. In fact, nearly 75% of our membership base is now from individuals signing up online—without ClearVantage, those numbers would not be possible."
FAAN has been particularly pleased with ClearVantage's web features. "One of the items that we use most heavily is the shopping cart functionality. With this, our members have a vast range of online 'self-service' options. Individuals can easily sign up for membership, register for events, donate money, and shop for educational products – all with the click of a mouse," explains Copan. "On the back end, everything on the web is seamlessly integrated with our systems here at our headquarters. This not only allows our members to update their information without calling our offices for assistance, but also allows us to access this information in real-time, making the management and tracking of this data less burdensome for our staff."
"Software aside, the Euclid team has always done their best to be as responsive as possible with any support issues and listens to suggestions that we have," Copan comments. "One particular instance in which Euclid's support team was quick to respond occurred when we needed a better method of understanding member preferences, history, and location. After we communicated this need, Euclid built a GPS locator function within ClearVantage. With this mechanism, we are now not only able to view detailed transaction history for every one of our members, but we are also able to pinpoint our members' exact distance from a particular location—a function that comes in handy when we need to know the best place to hold an event."
"FAAN has made great strides in raising awareness about the severity and rising prevalence of food allergies," says Charlie Vinal, President & CEO of Euclid. "As a parent who has a child with food allergies, I am delighted that our team and our software continue to help FAAN fulfill their mission – long after the go live – even as their needs and objectives change. That's the Euclid way – we don't just implement great software, we're there for our clients over the long run."