The Mountaineers Keep Climbing

Some non-profits fund raise for major technology upgrades, then breathe a sigh of relief and ignore technology until things start breaking. Rinse and repeat. Other non-profits avoid this feast-or-famine approach to technology spending by budgeting for continuous improvements. The Mountaineers is in the latter camp. In 2014 they completed a major technology upgrade and launched a new Plone+Salesforce website. Every year since, they have budgeted for significant improvements to their website and its Salesforce.com back end. They did this through modest support contracts with their technology partners (Jazkarta and Percolator Consulting), plus focused spikes of work that were done through a series of agile iterations. Over the last 3 years we have released enhanced versions of the website 10 times, with an overwhelming number of improvements – you can read all about that on their technology blog. These changes have allowed members, staff, volunteers, instructors, and the organization to get better and better at what they do.

The latest update is the biggest one yet. It has brought mountaineers.org and mountaineersbooks.org together into one, integrated website. The new and improved header and main navigation helps users know where they are and get to where they’re going. It looks great! We’re really proud to have helped bring it into the world.