Table of Contents
The Organization
The Electronic Music Alliance (EMA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and global membership alliance of dance music fans, artists, and industry idealists. They encourage their community to be the “Sound of Change.”
EMA organizes around issues important to the electronic dance music community, such as health, safety, greening, and giving back to their local communities through charitable works. They work to educate their community about these issues and create programs that offer fun & effective solutions.
The Challenge
The challenge that EMA faced was that they needed a way to connect its directors, founding members, new members, and fans worldwide. And to provide their membership base with an online destination to communicate, spread awareness, recruit new members, collaborate on new initiatives, and connect like-minded individuals.
They were using WordPress as their primary website and public facing blog to share industry news and happenings. Their founding members and directors were collaborating through email and Google Docs.
The EMA was lacking a community and collaboration software solution where members could login to communicate, share information and events, self-organize into local chapters and project teams, and where directors could collaborate on building new programs.
“Before Communifire, we used email and the WordPress blogging platform to communicate with our members and directors. We learned early that WordPress just wasn’t going to cut it. It was difficult to customize, it didn’t have a community feel to it, and it wasn’t sufficient to let our members communicate and collaborate like we needed. We needed a platform where we could have our members signup and participate in their own private social network, where they can self-organize into local chapters, and share best practices,” said Janine Jordan, Board Chair, Founder.
“Furthermore, we needed software that could allow our directors to communicate with each other openly and freely, outside of email chains and CC’s. There are 15 of us on the Board, so you could imagine how difficult it was to organize our work strictly through email,” said Jordan.
The Solution
EMA switched to Communifire in 2012 for all of their internal and external communications and for collaboration among its directors and founding members. Later that same year, they opened up a number of Communifire Spaces where their members could signup, create their own profiles, connect with each other, share news and new music, and network with each other. The EMA also uses the Communifire CMS pages as their public facing website and the blogging platform as their public blog where they share industry news and happenings, events and initiatives, and to spread their ideas of change for their community.
“It didn’t take us long to get the hang of Communifire. Once Axero set things up for us and gave us a few tutorials, we were able to organize pretty easily on our own. It’s pretty easy to pickup. Now, instead of using email, our directors communicate through the cases feature and discussion forums. We often use the private messaging and chat features for quick and spontaneous conversations,” said Jordan. “But what’s really awesome is when we opened it up for the rest of our members. We had quite a bit of people register on the site and immediately they started networking with each other, sharing relevant news and updates, and we often get people contacting us through the site to setup local chapters.“
The Outcome
The Electronic Music Alliance uses Communifire daily as their go-to means of communication between their directors and members. New members signup daily, and they have experienced swift growth due to having a community presence on the internet.
“The new EMA website has been a game changer! It is dynamic, easy to use and, most importantly, very effective. With Communifire as the platform, EMA can now do everything we dreamed about in the past,” says Ken Jordan, member of The Crystal Method and Founder of the EMA.
Janine Jordan also commented, “Communifire has been amazing for EMA. It’s really been a game changer in advancing the organization in terms of being able to effectively communicate with our entire community, from board down to supporters. We’re really happy with it and its capabilities. Whenever we ask Axero if Communifire can ‘do this, or do that,’ they always come back with a solution and help us out when we need it. We love it!“
