YMCA builds extensive online community

For more than 150 years, YMCAs have popped up in U.S. cities to bring people together and provide communities with shared health and social service resources. And this year, an online community will emerge to help the 2,575 YMCAs across the U.S. better share information and improve communication between employees, volunteers and each other.

Since the first Young Men's Christian Association was founded in Boston on Dec. 29, 1851, the not-for-profit organization has flourished, serving the needs of about 19 million men, women and children in 10,000 communities. Because each community is different, each YMCA exists autonomously and tends to address different health and social service needs with services for its members. While each YMCA's mission remains the same - to provide communities with much-needed resources - the means with which the organizations need to carry out this mission had to change.

Enter the YMCA of USA (Y-USA).

IT executives at Y-USA in Chicago, a national resource for the U.S. YMCAs, saw an opportunity to bring the disparate facilities together and help them share information and resources to better serve their respective communities. While most people are familiar with YMCA community centers - which provide members with educational training, hands-on activities and physical fitness resources - the Y-USA realized it also needed to establish an online community for its member organizations.

"Because each YMCA was contracting Web sites individually, we couldn't get a handle on how much was being spent on content management or how to support them," says Marie Lynch, director of operations at Y-USA.

About two years ago, her IT group decided to revamp how YMCAs use technology to manage content from employee benefits to volunteer training to scheduled activities. The YMCAexchange would serve as a corporate intranet or extranet - to store information and manage content about facilities as well as share data with other facilities through user logon ID and password-protected access to the online community - the Y-USA envisioned.

"Most of the facilities maintained a lot of paper records, and some of them didn't establish a Web presence other than for basic information. We wanted to provide a consistent online location for all the facilities to use," she says. "We had an online presence with the public, but we didn't have that same type of centralized location for our members."

To start, Lynch says the group surveyed YMCAs to discover what they would be willing to contribute to a centralized content management system. More than 500 individuals completed the survey, offering their likes and dislikes of the former intranet. In addition, 80 YMCA professionals from across the country participated in the development and design stage to work on the "wish lists" created from the survey. Following the positive response to the idea, Lynch's team began the more difficult process of breaking down the separate efforts to build an online community. To do this, Y-USA requested participating locations allocate 3% of their varied operating budgets toward a centralized IT budget that the Y-USA would administer. The group also reduced the number of planned IT projects from 100 to 20, by sharing resources from a centralized source.