Requirements
The Kiwanis Club of Ottawa is one of the most dymanic Service Clubs in the world with 250 members, 100+ years of service, and more than $400,000 raised for the community every year.
The Club was an early adopter for web sites for a number of reasons including providing up to date information to members, information to the general public, as well as increase the profile for sponsors who participate in Kiwanis events.
At the same time, the volunteer service Club had to find a way to allow for members and office staff to keep the site up to date on a simple and distributed basis.
Implementation by RKIL
RKIL has been supporting the web sites for the Club since 1997, when the first site came up as a pure HTML site.
In 2000, RKIL made use of the distributed ability of Lotus Notes to have a document management system which replicates information stored at multiple locations. The Kiwanis site was a Notes data base that allows members and staff linked to the system to create web pages by creating data base documents in the system. Based on categories specified by the creator, documents can appear at multiple parts of the site, and automatically appear on the home page for a period of time while they are current.
In 2012 RKIL migrated the over 2,000 pages from the site to use a content management system provided by Squarespace, and the Club has made use of this hosting service since that time. In 2017 an e-commerce component was added to allow the Club to sell Christmas trees on-line.
In addition to the main web site for the Kiwanis Club of Ottawa, RKIL also helps support a site for the Kiwanis TV Bingo, as well as a private photo site for members to share event photos, Facebook pages for the Club and the Accora Village Bed Race for Kiwanis, and Twitter accounts.