Systems Integration at Gorman Heritage Farm

When I first arrived at Gorman Heritage Farm, the speed and bandwidth of connectivity was a conspicuous limiting factor – 7 full-time, on-site staff were sharing a single cable internet connection. With data-heavy G-Suite as the Farm’s email and document sharing platform, staff would frequently leave the office to seek out a faster connection elsewhere.   Within the first year, I successfully negotiated a fiber optic installation with Cincinnati Bell that cost the farm nothing, but provided high speed internet to staff.

With the internet situation resolved, we began to make changes that would allow staff to devote more time and energy to action-based work that contributed directly towards the mission. I migrated our email communications from Constant Contact to Mailchimp, providing us greater flexibility for integration. I transitioned our volunteer application, website inquiry forms, online membership subscriptions, and online retails sales to Jotform to automate email receipts, Mailchimp subscriptions, and to improve our response time. We migrated our camp registrations and field trip registrations, previously on separate systems, into a single system, RegPacks.  I built the forms to utilize conditional logic to save our teachers and families time in completing the forms.  Lastly, I migrated our donor database, formerly NEON CMS, to Little Green Light, giving us the opportunity to integrate our systems further.

After 3 years, the result is a leaner, more integrated organization which provides staff more time to engage our community in teaching about nutrition, agriculture, and the environment and less time inputting names and data.