Create a complete digital experience
Doing digital well can be quite expensive. Open Y brings the best of digital together in a way that’s open and accessible to all YMCAs—regardless of size or budget. It allows a sharing infrastructure that preserves each individual YMCA’s autonomy.
What is It?
Philosophy
Open Y is the belief that working together—YMCA associations, the YUSA and partners—drives innovation and impact for all to learn, grow and thrive. Through collaboration, it’s easier for all of us to communicate and connect with customers across marketing channels.
Community
Open Y works to align, create and deliver better, faster and cheaper digital experiences—for today and tomorrow. We’re building a shared ecosystem to support and enable our future. When we work together, we move individuals, families and communities forward.
Digital platform
Open Y starts with your website and extends to other digital products, bringing together data and tools from membership, registration, fundraising and volunteer systems. Instead of individually investing in proprietary or fee-based digital platforms, we can use the same solution that’s always evolving to best meet the needs of YMCAs.
Platform Details
Content management
Open Y is a content management system—a computer application used to create or modify digital content (like a website or suite of digital signs).
Open source
Open Y is built using Drupal 8—an open-source software, which means that anyone can download, use and work on it.
Collaborative toolset
Open Y offers a shared platform to collect useful functions and modules from YMCAs and partners, which can be reused by the community.
The team
In 2016 a group of YMCA digital, marketing and technology experts recognized the digital opportunities that exist for the YMCA movement.
Led by a small group of YMCAs, the core team:
- Maintains the Open Y content management system and this website
- Ensures all basic functionality accessible from the content management system is available free of charge—those who contribute cannot charge others for what is shared
- Strives to be aware of issues found within the Open Y content management system
- Invites and approves partners to join
- Distributes communication about Open Y
- Organizes events for the Open Y community
The quality and performance of content is up to you—the Open Y team is not liable for bugs, crashes or performance issues of the content management system.