Non-Profit Organizations

The Salvation Army of North and South Carolina needed to more-reliably communicate its message of hope and its commitment, and to use the donors' resources in the most effective way possible.

By The MODX Team  |  Updated: May 7, 2014  |  3 min read
Non-Profit Organizations

A New Platform Powers a Trusted Message.

The Salvation Army of North and South Carolina needed to more-reliably communicate its message of hope and its commitment, and to use the donors' resources in the most effective way possible. MODX has helped them to stay true to their promise to “Do the Most Good.”

The Salvation Army of North and South Carolina Website

The Challenge

While many would consider The Salvation Army an early pioneer in web-based communication for non-profits, the underlying technology had begun to show its age. Desmond Smith of The Salvation Army, Carolinas Division, drove the redevelopment efforts. “Our previous CMS platform led to months of frustration,” he relayed. “Outages and capacity issues are never good. Approaching Christmas—our busiest season—they are simply unacceptable.”

Additionally, The Salvation Army has over 50 local offices around North and South Carolina. Desmond indicated that very few of these have staff with either the technical sophistication or the time in their schedules to maintain web content. “It’s the local, ‘front-line’ message that people want to hear,” Desmond says, “So any new system would have have to be built such that the local needs and the local success stories were what visitors would see, regardless of what personnel resources were available at a local level.”

Finally, not only was the goal to revolutionize the agencies web presence, but also to do it within a non-profit budget.

The MODX Solution

After extensive research, MODX was chosen based on it’s versatility and ease of customization. “It was easy to write standard PHP code to interact with legacy systems and databases, and the ability to add new templates seemed almost too easy.” Template variables provided the ability for the head office to easily change out content on local sites that weren’t being actively edited while not affecting those sites that were.

Making changes to content was essentially intuitive and our staff members caught on quickly.” Desmond said. “We have seen many more of the smaller offices actively engaged in maintaining their sites than we had originally anticipated.”

Since launching, Desmond has been able to add some requested features with ease. Again using, Template Variables, the team was able make social tools (e.g. Like and Tweet This buttons) available on any page by toggling a simple checkbox.

The team is now beginning the next major upgrade to the website. With a migration to Revolution and a fresh new design scheduled to be completed in early summer 2012, Desmond will being bringing new features like integrated blogging capabilities, and Facebook applications managed directly from MODX.

MODX Highlights

  • Salvation Army of the Carolinas
  • Custom MODX resources integrate with legacy databases
  • Local editors can easily maintain site content
  • Template variables allow head office to edit once, change everywhere for critical information
  • Reliability has meant increased visibility and increased online revenue for programs across the region
  • Easily roll out new features as needed