Human Services“I knew that chapters had their own records and they just weren’t sharing them with national. It wouldn’t be until I met with them individually that I’d find out what kind of impact they were making.”
– Lady Marie Bulilan, Chapter and Membership Development Manager, OCA
Once a year, OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates gathers its entire national organization into one room.
“Our conference is the annual convening of all OCA chapters from across the country,” says Thu Nguyen, OCA’s Executive Director. “We like to describe it as basically a huge family reunion, where we’re bringing them to a new city every year.”
Adam Slowinski, who leads partnerships at Neon One, attended for the first time this year and joined the organization in Detroit. What he noticed upon his arrival had nothing to do with software and everything to do with the sense of community that was palpable when he got there. “When you walked in the door, everybody was mingling with everybody. People weren’t in their own little pocket over here or their own little pocket over here.”
Then the week ends, everyone flies home, and OCA goes back to being dozens of volunteer-run chapters scattered across the country. And making that feeling of community last the other fifty-one weeks of the year is the national office’s main focus.
Fostering that sense of community and collaboration is also what led OCA to become a member of the Neon One Network Advantage Program.
An introduction to OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates
OCA began in 1973 as the Organization of Chinese Americans. In 2013, on its 40th anniversary, it rebranded as OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates and expanded its mission to advocate on behalf of all Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. The organization now has 30 local chapters where people work to educate, organize, and collectively advance the sociopolitical and holistic well-being of all AANHPI’s.
Local chapters run Lunar New Year festivals, night markets, mahjong clubs, backpack drives, and monthly talks on topics from mental health to immigration. They also organize, from opposing a mega jail in Manhattan’s Chinatown to pressing Seattle on conditions in the Chinatown-International District.
Large national impact and an inability to capture it
Almost all of the organization’s activities are free and open to anyone who registers, which means the community a chapter serves is far larger than its member list. Keeping track of their true network of supporters around the country has always been a challenge for OCA.
Lady Marie Bulilan, OCA’s Chapter and Membership Development Manager, is responsible for striking the balance between helping chapters thrive on their own and also collaborating as one national organization. Most chapters run on their own makeshift setups, usually Excel and a sign-up form, with no consistent format and no easy way to share numbers with the national office.
“I knew that chapters had their own records and they just weren’t sharing them with national,” Lady Marie says. “It wouldn’t be until I met with them individually that I’d find out what kind of impact they were making.”
Thu added to this, noting how their reporting numbers could be wildly off.
“Some chapters, on national’s end, say they have like 12 members, but then when I talk to the chapter, they’d tell me that they had more than one hundred.”
– Thu Nguyen, Executive Director, OCA
When it comes to applying for funding or reporting on results to funders, these inaccurate counts can be costly.
Chapters pay the price too. If chapters were working out of spreadsheets, finding out who lapsed, who renewed, or who came once and never returned took real digging. Then the chapters that did use the national office’s software had a different problem: every time they wanted a report, they had to email Lady Marie and ask her to run it.
OCA was stuck between two bad options. Chapters could stay independent and inconsistently reported, or they could have better reporting options but be dependent on a national office that was already stretched thin.
A question asked, an answer found
In 2025, Lady Marie submitted a question through the Neon One website.
The national office had been using Neon CRM by Neon One successfully for close to a decade, and she wanted to know: Could different Neon CRM accounts connect with each other?
That question brought Adam into the conversation. They began a conversation that led OCA to join Neon One’s Network Advantage Program.
What the Network Advantage Program gives OCA
OCA needed chapter independence and connection with the National Office at the same time, and the Network Advantage Program was built to provide both.
The program checks the boxes on some features that OCA was looking for in a technology partner:
- Autonomy for every chapter. Each chapter runs its own private Neon CRM account and controls its own records. For an organization powered entirely by volunteers, that independence was non-negotiable.
- One system across the whole network. Because chapters and the national office use the same platform, chapter data is consistent and accurate. Chapters can run their own reports without waiting on Lady Marie, and the national office can finally see what chapters are really doing.
- One agreement, with chapters paying for themselves. The national office negotiates a single buying agreement, while each chapter handles its own payment, at consistent pricing across the network.
- Onboarding as a group. Chapters learn the system together, with the national team alongside them, rather than each volunteer figuring it out alone.
The result is something OCA’s spreadsheets could never produce.
“It speaks to our credibility and to our funding, when we can tell funders, ‘These are the numbers, this is the actual data that is coming from our chapters.”
– Thu Nguyen, Executive Director, OCA
A winning pitch for community visibility
Now, even though the core features were what the National Office was looking for, a program like this only works if chapters actually join. And for volunteer-led groups, that’s hard. Everyone is already busy, and Lady Marie knew the challenge was persuasion rather than procurement.
She gave Adam a workshop slot at their annual conference, and the two spent weeks planning it. Surprisingly, very little of it was about Neon CRM.
“I didn’t go into the product at all whatsoever,” Adam says. “Instead, I really focused on where these chapters are at right now, why your national organization has decided to embark on this partnership, and the outcomes they could achieve by joining.”
The phrase he kept returning to was “community visibility.” When a chapter hosts an open event, reporting only on dues-paying members makes everyone else invisible. That means weaker numbers for the national office, and it means chapters lose the chance to build relationships with the people who showed up.
Having a clean record of all attendees in Neon CRM creates a record that serves both National and local chapters’ needs. The chapter’s real community reach becomes visible at the national level and, at the local level, chapters can continue to engage attendees, working to build long-lasting relationships.
“You can work on spreadsheets, and literally that’s all you’re doing, it’s not telling a story. When that information’s inside your Neon CRM account—with the reports, the analytics, the KPIs—those tell the story of the real community behind the data.”
– Adam Slowinski, Stratetic Accounts Director, Neon One
And the pitch worked. One chapter leader came to the workshop skeptical of Neon One and decided to join on the spot. “That was all Adam,” Lady Marie says. Though Adam deflects the credit: “There’s so much work being done by so many different people through this partnership to make it work.”
Looking ahead with Neon One
OCA’s national conference returns next summer in Sacramento, and will be hosted by this year’s Chapter of the Year, which already runs on Neon CRM.
More chapters will arrive with a clearer picture of their communities. They’ll know who came to their last event, whose membership is about to lapse, and who showed up for the first time and may need some outreach to keep them engaged.
It’ll be another chance to see the OCA community in action, and we couldn’t be more excited for our Network Advantage Program to continue to support the incredible work that they’re doing.
Ready to connect your network?
If you’re a chapter-based organization that’s ready to tap into the power of a CRM but unsure about where to start, we’re here to support you.
Neon One’s Network Advantage Program will reduce your costs and prevent stress while providing customized tools, streamlined training, and a true sense of community to your entire organization.
Or you can schedule a call with our team
