CAIA Association

The Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Association (CAIA) is a global community of dedicated finance practitioners committed to providing excellent alternative investment (AI) education. CAIA leverages its worldwide membership to elevate AI knowledge, best practices and professionalism — all while keeping a real-time pulse on the investment industry. Through its coveted CAIA designation, the organization seeks to establish, advocate and promote the highest standards of professional financial conduct.

Objective

CAIA approached OpenCircle with the goal of establishing, evolving and maintaining a soup-to-nuts online presence in keeping with the organization’s reputation as one of the financial industry’s premier alternative investment educators.

• Accommodate five-year predicted growth
• Achieve maximum search engine visibility
• Maintain and enhance brand consistency in design
• Realign site functionality to mirror business processes
• Implement innovative features to attract and retain members
• Enhance performance, navigation, reliability, usability and accessibility

Collaboration

OpenCircle engaged in a sophisticated, massive build process. Hardware and software. Fully managed dedicated LAMP server architucture. PHP, Drupal, Zend Framework, a custom “sugar” CRM, VPNs, managed hosting. You name it, we built it. A smattering of the scope includes:

• User Roles: visitors, authenticated users, members and editors
• User Options: account creation, registration and profile tools, information records, agreements, exam histories and membership status
• Custom CMS: WYSIWYG editing interface capable of retrieving previous content, verifying broken-links, cloned and embedded dynamic content
• Data Migration: for images, linked files, user accounts, profiles, order history, agreements, exam history, past event descriptions and attendee lists
• 3-Stage Membership Process: payment, expiration/renewal and member directory
• User-Defined Content: custom homepage featuring recent updates in current events, blog posts and bibliographic items
• Triggers: notifications based on user account creation, exam and event registration, profile updates and membership expiration/renewal
• Security: SSL encryption for admins, members and users; document, notes and source code confidentiality; zero credit card info storage
• Exams: manage eligibility, registration, successful completion and payment
• User Status Reporting: active, membership-eligible, agreement issues and pending approvals for discount and alternate payment
• Performance: achieve and sustain peak cyclical traffic of 150 simultaneous users with minimum degradation and a 30 percent increase in average page load-time
• Events: registration, payment and rates, attendance limits (exportable lists)

Success

The new site achieved all of its intended objectives, ultimately skyrocketing organization membership and the elevating the lucrative reputation of the CAIA designation. OpenCircle's new secure server architecture easily supported millions of hits per month, in turn providing the strong foundation needed to fulfill growth estimates. OpenCircle has since established a long-standing relationship with the company to provide consistent turnkey online functionality that positions CAIA.org as the foremost destination for alternative investment education.