ODVA

Objective: One digital platform for a global standards organization

ODVA is the international standards development organization behind some of the most widely used industrial communication technologies in the world, including EtherNet/IP. Its members are the leading vendors in industrial automation, and its digital presence has to serve engineers researching the standards, member companies managing their participation, and staff running the organization day to day.

ODVA spent two years trying to implement an off-the-shelf association management system - and it never fit the way their organization actually works. Rather than keep bending their operations around someone else’s software, ODVA asked Web Ascender to build a platform tailored to their exact needs.

What Web Ascender Did

Over more than a decade of partnership, we’ve built and continue to evolve ODVA’s entire digital ecosystem:

• The ODVA website - the organization’s public website: the home for standards information, news, events, and member resources
• The ODVA Marketplace - a product marketplace where the industry discovers ODVA-conformant products and the vendors behind them
• A fully custom association management system - memberships, the contact database, email communications, invoice generation, and more, all designed around ODVA’s real workflows instead of an off-the-shelf vendor’s assumptions
• Staff training and ongoing support - the ODVA team was up and running quickly, with a partner one call away as the organization grows
• Managed hosting, security, and uptime - we own the infrastructure end to end: hosting for all three platforms, security patching, backups, SSL, and around-the-clock uptime monitoring, so ODVA’s team never has to think about servers
• Retained for continuous improvement - ODVA keeps Web Ascender on an ongoing retainer to extend the platforms as the organization’s needs change: new features, integrations, performance tuning, and the small refinements that add up

The Outcome

ODVA now runs on software that fits - a public website, marketplace, and management system that work as one platform. Staff picked up the new tools easily, member experience improved, and the two-year struggle with a misfit AMS is behind them. More than a project, it’s a partnership: Web Ascender has been ODVA’s digital team for over ten years and counting.

Still Climbing Together

This isn’t a project we finished and handed off. Web Ascender remains ODVA’s digital team today, on retainer for continuous improvements across the website, marketplace, and association management system, and responsible for the hosting infrastructure, security, and uptime that keep all three running. When ODVA has a new idea, a new program to support, or a member need to meet, we’re the ones who build it.