Freemasons Organization Portal

Freemasons and their Finnish central organization, the Grand Lodge of Finland, are an organization that provides moral instruction and—for many of its members—a way of life, and will soon be celebrating their centennial.

Like all large organizations, Freemasons also need tools and resources to organize their activities. After a long and careful consideration, G-Works was selected to develop the Freemasons’ organizational portal.

With approximately 7,400 members, the Freemasons pale in comparison to many other organizations in terms of numbers, but due to the nature of their activities, this relatively small group is certainly more active than average. The membership is organized into a structure that, in everyday terms, can be described as districts and local chapters.

As with other organizations, this membership also requires services to manage organizational administration, events, communications, and other related matters.

The Freemasons themselves had a very clear vision and a long-term roadmap of what kind of organizational portal would best suit their activities and what they wanted to accomplish at each stage of the project.

In the first phase, they needed basic communication tools for the organizations, an internal online store, and tools for staying in touch. In the second phase, they needed event information, meeting minutes, and other essentials for organizational operations.

A public website was launched as part of the service; it provides general information about Freemasonry and is open to everyone. This is the part that we can all see, and it represents only a very small portion of the entire project.

The true heart of the solution lies in the organization portal.

The static content on the organization’s portal is managed using the WordPress content management system, which is further divided into multisite installations based on the organization’s mid-level units. However, most of the content is retrieved into the portal via two different interfaces: one is an interface to a commercial and widely used membership registry service, and the other is an internal enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implemented by the Freemasons themselves.

The membership registry interface was provided to G-Works as-is, but the ERP system interface practically did not exist at all when the project began. G-Works was able to play a major role in the design and implementation of this interface, while dedicated Masonic brothers handled the other end of the interface.

The complexity of the project, as well as the interest it generated from outside the organization, made it extremely interesting for G-Works. The various components of the solution had a broad impact on the whole, and to avoid a technological dead end, every decision had to be carefully considered in light of the Freemasons’ own roadmap.

It turned out well, and even today, a significant number of Freemasons use the organizational portal provided by G-Works.