Freshwater Alliance

The Freshwater Alliance is a project of Tides Canada Initiatives. The Freshwater Alliance helps Canada’s diverse non-profit water community reach goals to secure healthy, thriving waters from across the nation by connecting and advancing provincial and national efforts to protect and restore Canada’s vital waterways. Running a virtual office, the Alliance has staff located across the country.

Living waters are essential to the well-being of all Canadians and in a time where the health of our waterways is threatened, the work of the Freshwater Alliance and its partners becomes increasingly important. The Freshwater Alliance values align with those of The Jibe: their initiative is environmentally and socially conscious, and their commitment to empowering the community feeds The Jibe’s vision.

the twist

The Freshwater Alliance wanted to start building an online presence and start connecting with partners right away, so implementation needed to happen quickly despite the need for an in-depth discovery exercise.

Given Freshwater Alliance’s mixed approach to partner plans (monthly/yearly subscriptions + a la carte items) providing a scalable and flexible system to manage recurring billing.

the solution

In order to address Freshwater Alliance's pressing need to get traction and buzz, we set up an initial one-pager while the full website was being developed.

In order to easily manage subscriptions and recurring billing, we opted to use Chargify for its ease of use, flexibility and familiarity. We initially ported the Drupal 6 version of the Chargify module to Drupal 7 and eventually did a complete rewrite using Composer.

Blue State Digital, an external tool for database management was brought in as an add-on tool to help subscribers handle their contact lists, email lists and forms, personal and institutional fundraising, canvassing management, and event creation and control. Similarly, Hootsuite Enterprise was added to help alliance members manage their social media accounts more efficiently, as well as engage with their audience.

the result

Freshwateralliance.ca provides a useful set of tools for organizations promoting water conservation in Canada. By providing downloadable resources, social media management and networking opportunities, partnering organizations across the country can streamline their outreach efforts and be more effective in reaching out to their constituents.

Joining the Freshwater Alliance offers live webinars and presentations, real-time resources and all access archive, discounted access to regional and national alliance events and trainings, basic access to the Brew Creek Campaign Atlas and Hootsuite Enterprise and Blue State Digital add-ons to help manage contacts and social media engagement.