International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP)

About IAAP

The International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) is a not-for-profit professional association for office professionals with approximately 28,000 members and affiliates and nearly 600 chapters worldwide. Our mission is to enhance the success of career-minded administrative professionals by providing opportunities for growth through education, community building and leadership development. The association founded in 1942 (read more about the History of IAAP) as the National Secretaries Association to provide a professional network and educational resources for secretarial staff. The association's name was changed in 1998 to the International Association of Administrative Professionals to encompass the large number of varied administrative job titles and recognize the advancing role of administrative support staff in business and government.

The Challenge

IAAP maintains two separate websites: a public-facing “headquarters” site intended for both members and non-members alike, and a member site that is hosted separately and developed by a third-party company (Higher Logic) that specializes in web communities for associations. While the member site is updated through a CMS, the headquarters’ site previously was maintained manually without the aid of a CMS. In addition, IAAP has limited staff to update and maintain its main website.

The Solution

In order to make updating its main website as easy and dynamic as possible, the Drupal content management system was chosen to eliminate the need to regularly and manually update multiple pages across the site.

Why Drupal

Drupal’s open-source community, wide variety of modules, flexibility and extendability made it the obvious choice for development of this site. Because IAAP’s member site already includes social networking and community functionality, many of those features in Drupal were not implemented with this site at this time. But the possiblity to easily add that functionality was also a factor in choosing Drupal.

Implementation

Due to limited resources, the site was developed completely by IAAP staff with limited web development and design experience.

Issues in Implementation

IAAP’s member database is an older version setup on a Windows IIS server. This makes connecting our database with Drupal rather difficult, and at this time it was decided to not attempt doing so because the member website is already connected to the member database. Therefore, Drupal’s login system is not being utilized except for admin use.

Modules Used

Ad
Admin Menu
Backup Migrate
Better Formats
Better Messages
Blocks 404
Calendar
CCK
Chart
Charts
Clickpath
Commenty Notify
Content Profile
Context
Countdown
CSS Gzip
Ctools
Date
DDBlock
Drupal Tweaks
Emfield
Exclude Node Title
Filefield
Filefield Sources
Fivestar
Gigya Bookmark
Gmap
Google Analytics
Image
Image API
Image Cache
Image Field
IMCE
IMCE WYSIWYG
Jquery UI
Jquery Update
Lightbox2
Link
Location
Media Vimeo
Media YouTube
Menu Attributes
Menu Block
Nice Menus
Node Adoption
Node Expire
Page Title
Panels
Path Redirect
Pathauto
PNG Fix
Quick Tabs
Rules
Semantic Views
Skinr
SWF Tools
Taxonomy Hide
Taxonomy Super Select
Token
Upload Path
Views
Views Accordian
Views Slideshow
Voting API
Webform
WYSIWYG
XML Sitemap

Design

IAAP was able to shave a lot of design costs by purchasing the City Magazine theme from designer “themesmania” on the website themeforest.net. For the price, this theme was able to be modified to fit IAAP’s needs. In addition, technical support from themesmania was incredibly valuable and timely.

Working with a staff designer whose experience is mostly in print, all of the graphics on the site were created in house and were consistent in color scheme and design.

Features/Highlights

Because IAAP has more than 600 chapters worldwide, building a chapter locator map was very important. In addition to a map, a chapter locator by zip code was also implemented.