Why the Federation of Canadian Municipalities chose ClearVantage

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) is a non-profit organization based in Ottawa, Canada’s capital.  It is the voice of Canadian municipalities at the national level.  FCM’s membership consists of over 1600 municipalities, representing roughly 9/10’s of Canada’s population.

In addition to FCM’s primary role, it also includes the International Centre for Municipal Development (ICMD) and the Centre for Sustainable Community Development (CSCD).  ICMD manages a number of programs that link Canadian municipalities with communities outside Canada, generally with a focus on knowledge/expertise transfer and community development.  CSCD administers the Green Municipal Fund and acts as a focus for information on sustainable practices at the community level.

As a result of these separate mandates, different parts of the organization developed independent applications for the storage of the data related to their functions.  However, it became clear that each area was storing information about individuals and organizations, and relations between those.  Further, it was evident that there was much overlap in terms of the individuals and organizations of interest to the different areas.  As FCM grew, so did issues arising from redundant storage and inconsistency of information in the separate data stores.  FCM management decided to implement a central repository for this data.  This led to a project which investigated a number of potential off-the-shelf applications that could meet FCM’s needs, after conducting a requirements review to establish what those needs were.

In addition to the conventional needs of a non-profit, membership-based organization (soliciting members, collecting membership fees based on a complex formula), FCM hosts an annual conference and trade show, a bi-annual conference and trade show for Sustainable Communities, and a significant number of Board and committee meetings.  FCM publishes multiple periodical magazines and newsletters for different audiences, both hard-copy and electronic.  FCM communicates with its membership and others on a frequent basis via facsimile transmissions and e-mails, often en masse. 

FCM wanted a single repository for this data which could be accessed by all staff, while allowing updates to be controlled by designated staff only. The product interface had to be sufficiently easy to use and intuitive that staff actually would want to use it.  FCM also wanted to allow external stakeholders to be able to update their own information via the Web, as well as support on-line registration for conferences – including payment.

FCM conducted a significant survey of available products for association management, trade show management, conference registration and logistics, committee management, subscription management, automated communications tools, contact management and tracking, preferably with integration to the existing financial system, and compatibility with the existing hardware and software infrastructure.  This led to a short list of five vendors that received a formal RFP.  After evaluation of the responses and demonstrations by the five vendors, two were judged sufficiently interesting to warrant a “shoot-out”; full-day demonstrations on-site on consecutive days.  After this process, FCM’s evaluation committee decided on Euclid’s ClearVantage as their first choice.

Finally, the client-vendor relationship is very important to FCM, as the organization plans to have little in the way of in-house resources to support the technical aspects of operating the application.  FCM conducted multiple reference checks of both the finalists, and found the interviews with existing ClearVantage customers to be reassuring.  These conversations established Euclid’s background and experience with other non-profit organizations.  FCM looks forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Euclid, especially as the ClearVantage product is enhanced in the future to include even more features and capabilities.

At the time of writing, FCM is just starting into the design phase with Euclid and looking forward to completing the ClearVantage implementation before the end of 2007.  Only after the product has been in use for several months will FCM truly be able to judge the full benefits of its selection of ClearVantage.