Houston Psychoanalytic Society
Houston Psychoanalytic Society (HPS) is a professional membership organization dedicated to promoting psychoanalytic and psychodynamic principles through educational events featuring distinguished local, national, and international speakers. The society offers accredited continuing education programs tailored for licensed professionals seeking deeper psychoanalytic understanding.
Key takeaways
- Unified Association Management System: Replaced Jotform, Constant Contact, spreadsheets and web.com with a centralized CiviCRM + WordPress system.
- Administrative Efficiency: Reduced the manual workload for the Administrative Director by making it a repeatable process simplifying the event setup and automating member pricing and post-event certificate delivery.
- Dynamic Event Listings: Events are now categorized and filterable by type, credit offering, presenter and event name and dynamically populate. The event setup is almost exclusively done in Wordpress for simplicity. All of this syncs with CiviEvent.
- Zoom Integration: Automatically tracks attendance and includes Zoom join links and scheduled reminders that are configured for the entire program year.
- Membership Management: Members have more control over what they need from HPS by download certificates, seeing upcoming/past registrations, update their profiles for the "find a therapist" listing and renewal of their memberships. Member verification became automatic.
- Reporting for Accreditation: Created a dashboard for detailed APA/APsA reporting by tracking key event participation metrics such as attendee professions (e.g., physician, psychologist or neither) breaks down by geography, licensure type, and membership type. Board members can log in and view real-time reports, eliminating the back-and-forth with the Administrative Director.
- Professional Web Redesign: Website platform moved to WordPress with room to evolve. Modernized the aesthetic and with dynamic content for events and "find a therapist" listing, improving credibility and usability.
Scenario
When you’re running 60+ accredited events a year with a sole staff member, a patchwork of systems can’t scale. For the Houston Psychoanalytic Society, streamlining was about making the job sustainable.
HPS came from a fragmented technological ecosystem involving multiple disconnected tools. They used Jotform for event signups and certificate delivery, Zoom for virtual events, and Constant Contact for email communication. As a small but mature professional association, their Administrative Director, Kim Haq as sole staff member had to stitch it all together for each event, which was time-intensive, sometimes error prone and hard to build reports on the fly.
Initially, the considered CiviCRM Spark but realized they needed more robust and customized functionality all within an integrated website. So, they decided to use the full CiviCRM version.
Looking ahead, the project focused on removing repetitive tasks that could be automated away along the event publishing, certificate management handling and member management areas. Essentially, systematizing the in-house process.
The specific challenges with the legacy system included:
- A cumbersome, manual event setup process between Jotform, web.com website and Constant Contact, with the latter creatively being used as the “info page” to view an event. The website only had a list linking to this Constant Contact info page and had to be removed manually after the event ended.
- Manual differentiation and verification of member vs. non-member event pricing after each event. Jotform was unaware of who was a member, so the signup was “honor system” based, which sometimes resulted in time spent correcting membership types, communicating by email with registrants who signed up incorrectly, and creating/tracking invoices when registrations were incorrectly submitted by the registrant.
- Manually send Zoom invites and reminders and people not getting the event on their calendar.
- Members lacked access to view and download their continuing education certificates whenever they wanted, so they would end up emailing the Administrative Director for this.
- A static, manually-updated membership directory that regularly fell months out of date, wasn’t particularly visually appealing. and could not be filtered
- Each event would require a new Jotform and spawn a new spreadsheet of event attendee data, also duplicating contact data.
- An inflexible, proprietary website platform on web.com that did not allow a dynamic event listing by category, credit type or other options that would have been impossible to build out regardless
- Originally, they’d built the website with Constant Contact’s free web builder. It was sold to Web.com and HPS was forced to pay for a subscription for that. You can see the “before” site using the WayBack Machine snapshot here.
- The site was sufficient but lacked cohesive branding and a designer’s touch.
The solution
Implementing CiviCRM with WordPress
The chosen solution integrated CiviCRM with a new WordPress website, leveraging the intuitive content management capabilities and connected CiviCRM to WordPress for their event listing, board members page, and the “find a therapist” listing.
This allows HPS to view it as a unified system rather than two; quite the dramatic turnaround from disparate systems now that CiviCRM is their the central hub of knowledge.
Website redesign
While a small site, it is highly dynamic and logic heavy for event listings. We partnered with Nickolena Sidler from Creative Marinara to provide design strategy, comprehensive layouts for direction that was implemented by Civicopilot. Nickolena also refreshed the look of their logo.
Btw: The website looks stunning! So clean and clear. Impressive.
– APsA Director of Accreditation
Event management efficiency
We overhauled the event process through deep integration of event management thru CiviEvent and WP Event Organiser:
- Automatic application of member/non-member pricing with CiviDiscount during registrations, with a prompt to join if not a member.
- Variable pricing modes of discount, flat, member only and free. The discount mode is dynamic and further changes based on the type of event. For events where they collaborate with an external organization (e.g.The Jung Center), the registration button instead pushes them off site instead.
- Robust, filterable event listings you can see here by type (Conference, Lecture, Book Discussion, film, Meet the Author ,Study Group), credit type (CME/CEU/CE and CEU/CE) and what presenters are highlighted.
- Event templates were customized to the exact requirements to highlight the agenda, learning objectives and presenters and secondary hosts involved. Event layouts were based on event category. For instance, study groups and workshops typically have 4-6 week recurring sessions and needed an accordion layout with learning objectives and references nested within to present the event info cleanly.
- Real-time attendance management via Zoom integration, tracking who actually attends and marking that back in CiviCRM significantly reducing manual overhead.
- Customized and branded event message templates that includes the Zoom join link and ability to add their event to your Google calendar or other calendar tool of choice so people are less likely to forget.
- Automatic event reminders prior to the event that are “set and forget it”. They use CiviCRM’s scheduled reminder functionality and include the Zoom link. Additionally for presenters, they are reminded to submit materials ahead of Study Group, Workshop, Seminar type events so it can be reviewed well enough in advance.
Automatic certificate distribution
Automation made the certificate process simpler now that members receive CME/CEU/CE or CEU/CE certificates 7 days after completing event evaluations. The evaluations are anonymous and HPS continues to use Jotform for this specialized purpose. Members can access all past certificates via a dedicated self-service portal.
The certificate, powered by the Certificates extension, draws on CiviEvent data showing the credits earned, the presenter and any supporting roles such as interviewer involved with the relevant disclosure based on the credit type offered. One message template handles it all!
Self-service member portal
The member portal makes self-service a reality:
- Members automatically receive welcome emails and login credentials upon signup
- Easy access to upcoming and past event registrations, certificates, and manage their profile on the membership directory.
- Members can view and renew their membership, with a logic to show the renew option when the membership is 45 days or sooner from lapsing. For auto-renewals, it displays the renewal date.
Comprehensive reporting
Reporting capabilities were mission critical element due to reporting requirements to the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). This resulted in building reports with Search Kit and Form Builder to provide a Unified Participants Reporting Dashboard, that provided answers such as:
- APsA Reporting: Number of physicians vs. non-physicians and total attendees for each event
- APA Reporting: Number of psychologists vs. non-psychologists and total attendees per event
In addition, the HPS board members now has direct access to key statistics via their own logins, so there’s no longer the need to wait, or put strain on, the Administrative Director to “pull another report” ahead of each monthly board meeting.
The unified dashboard filters several reports at once, making it possible to search by event, time frame, credit type, role, attendee status and licensure category. A few examples are breakdowns by:
- Membership type: Full, Student and non-members attending each event
- Licensure categorization: Physicians, Psychologists, Social Workers (LCSW), Licensed Professional Counselors (LPC), Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT)
- Geographical location: participant segmented by Texas only, national (U.S. excluding Texas), and international locations.
We developed automations that have streamlined our event and certification processes, making them more efficient and reliable. Tasks that once required a great deal of manual oversight (ie: applying member pricing, sending reminders, tracking attendance, and issuing certificates) are now handled seamlessly and with far less risk of error.
Results
The WordPress and CiviCRM implementation delivers substantial operational improvements and quality web presence positioned HPS for increased efficiency and exposure to deliver high quality event programs for their psychoanalytic community.
Members now benefit from dynamic event listing to easily signup for the events that work for them, automatic discounts and direct access to their certificates.
By consolidating previously disconnected tools into a unified platform, the administrative burden is substantially reduced (several hours per week). Comprehensive reporting capabilities further simplify accreditation compliance and provides the board with immediate insights for informed decision-making.