The Cleveland Metro Bar Association (CMBA) ran its website and member solutions through an all-in-one Association Management platform. It did a little of everything, well enough, at a premium: tens of thousands of dollars a year for user licenses, pay-per-view fees for Continuing Legal Education videos, and limited ability to customize service offerings through the platform.
The day-to-day cost more too. The website was painfully slow and difficult to maintain. Members constantly reached out with issues and often created duplicate accounts in an effort to self-serve. CMBA was forced to adopt sub-optimal workarounds to serve their members the way a Bar Association should.
CMBA didn't need a bigger budget. It needed a solution built for its needs.
Novel Minds partnered with CMBA to build a custom Association Management platform, powered by widely trusted open-source (free) software. That decision reshaped six parts of how the bar association runs, day to day:
Why reinvent the wheel? There's a wealth of specialized software that excels in its craft. Rather than build individual components ourselves, we built a plug-n-play system that can connect to virtually anything. This allowed CMBA to pick their favorite CRM, Marketing tool, Job Board, etc. and connect it right into the heart of their ecosystem. And it gets better, these systems actually talk to each other.
Videos and courses now live directly on CMBA's own platform, with no per-view fees and no annual re-licensing of content that never changes. Attorney CLE-hours tracking and Ohio Supreme Court reporting, once a manual data-entry process, are now built into the system CMBA already uses every day.
CMBA will never have to worry about buying additional User seats, or how they'll keep their student interns engaged. Unlimited users, members, guests, custom roles, access restrictions, and permissions. Need a special account that can only access X, Y, and Z? Done. Need a system of record for Companies and Organizations instead of tracking them as Users? Done.
CMBA now owns and controls its platform database, giving their team unprecedented access to Business Intelligence reporting. CMBA's team can see exactly what data feeds every number, and build a new report the moment a new question comes up instead of spending hours combining spreadsheets.
The platform is built using open-source technologies, which is free and highly-extendable software capable of delivering world-class solutions. This gives CMBA the ability to design custom features for its staff and members, without a hefty price tag or a vendor telling them it can't be done.
Modern visual website editing allows CMBA to update their website in minutes. Gone are the days where they updated a field, reviewed the preview page, only to go back and undo their change because it didn't look right. A new page template, a copy update, a new event listing: none of it requires a developer, a support ticket, or a change-order quote, so updates happen the same day instead of the same quarter.
The clearest result is the bill.
*Platform and infrastructure only. Ongoing support from Novel Minds is available separately.
That's a 85%+ cut in platform costs, and every dollar now builds something CMBA owns instead of rents.
The rest doesn't show up on an invoice: a thriving member community, dues staff can actually explain, and reports that answer real questions instead of requiring a spreadsheet.
All-in-one platforms serve thousands of organizations off one shared codebase. Every feature is a compromise, and every customization is a change order.
CMBA's platform was built the other way around: shaped by their actual membership structure, CLE offerings, and member communities, not the reverse.
The same choice shows up anywhere an organization has outgrown an off-the-shelf Association Management platform and pays more each year for less flexibility. We excel at building the alternative: custom-owned platforms shaped around how an organization actually runs.
