Holy Yoga is a non-profit Christian ministry founded in 2003 in Moorhead City, Minnesota, which makes use of the essential yoga elements in worshipping Jesus Christ. In essence, Holy Yoga is designed to provide believers and non-believers alike the opportunity to authentically connect to Christ through yoga movements, physical worship, and meditation.
To do this, their website: holyyoga.net is designed to give people the chance to take part in yoga classes, enroll in immersive yoga instructor training programs, attend virtual bible studies, workshops, and retreats – and even to become certified yoga instructors.
Under the hood, the Holy Yoga website is powered by Drupal CMS – a publishing platform that comes with many tools to help organize, structure, find and re-use content, and CiviCRM – a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software that keeps tracking the information of constituents.
The Drupal CMS allows the Holy Yoga team to create and manage many content types, like articles, reading materials and user video tutorials; create user accounts and manage permissions to its contents and pages. Why Drupal CMS? With Drupal modules, even those new to publishing will find its user-interface (UI), polished, flexible and powerful. Thus, making it easier for the Holy Yoga team to manage its website and content assets.
On the other hand, CiviCRM is an ideal constituent management system for a non-profit organization such as Holy Yoga. With CiviCRM, the HY team can keep track of their constituent information, manage mailing lists, create events, and accept donations, as well as record members and participants.
Bringing It All Together…
However, several existing processes in Holy Yoga can’t be completely captured using existing out of the box technologies. Henceforth, a combination of manual processing and automation in CiviCRM is done on most of the key workflows, like the interviewing process, renewal of membership or subscription, and processing of payments. And so with the desire to refine their website and improve the way they work, Holy Yoga has partnered with Chromedia Far East Inc.
Weaving agile methodologies and Scrum framework during the development process, new features are delivered quickly and frequently within fixed schedule iterations every 2-3 weeks. This also provides Chromedia’s cross-functional development team the opportunity to beta test the website – gaining valuable feedback early in the project, and providing the client the ability to make changes as needed.
By utilizing several agile practices such as BDD, code reviews, and daily meetings the team understands what’s most important to the client’s business, and in turn this led to the success of the project. Also, through the integration of an automatic process in Drupal for Holy Yoga’s payment gateway, the client was able to improve its existing workflow. Henceforth, creating better interview and renewal membership process that in turn increased customer satisfaction and management.
