The Challenge
The National Hydropower Association faced a major operational bottleneck: their staff was manually copying contact records every day from Naylor (their Association Management System) into Rasa.io (their email marketing platform).
This manual process was:
Time-consuming, requiring daily staff effort.
Error-prone, leading to incomplete or outdated records.
Unsustainable, given the hundreds of thousands of member records that needed to remain accurate.
NHA needed a solution that would keep their Rasa.io lists automatically and reliably in sync with their AMS data.
The Approach
The integration was a unique challenge:
Rasa.io provided an API, making it straightforward to push data into their system.
Naylor, however, offered no API access — meaning the only option was to automate interactions with their web interface.
To solve this, Albright Labs engineered a PhantomJS headless browser implementation to scrape and extract records from Naylor on a nightly basis. To handle NHA’s massive data volume, we carefully tuned request speeds to avoid tripping anti-bot protections.
Data management, sync tracking, and retry logic were built into a custom October CMS backend, while Laravel powered the automation layer and queue management.
Execution & Delivery
The project was delivered in three focused sprints:
PhantomJS automation – nightly scraping of records from Naylor.
October CMS backend – dashboard for sync tracking, record status, and retry controls.
Rasa.io API integration – automatic nightly updates to assure email lists stayed current.
The final solution provided:
Automated nightly sync for hundreds of thousands of records.
Retry logic for records that failed to sync.
Admin dashboard for monitoring sync status.
Results & Impact
The results were immediate and transformative:
100% automated synchronization of AMS records to Rasa.io.
Daily accuracy across hundreds of thousands of contact records.
Zero manual data entry required by NHA staff.
The client was thrilled with the solution and continues to rely on it every single day as the backbone of their member communication workflows.
Lessons Learned
The most challenging aspect of this project was working around Naylor’s lack of an API. By carefully controlling request speeds and simulating human-like interactions, we successfully automated data extraction at scale.
This project demonstrated Albright Labs’ ability to combine creative problem-solving with technical precision — even when faced with restrictive platforms — to deliver powerful automations that save clients time and money.
