Sector(s)
Drupal is the platform of choice for Beneva, Canada’s largest insurance mutual with more than 3.5 million members and customers, over CAD 20 billion in assets under management, and over 5,000 staff. Beneva’s Drupal-based bilingual website is accessible, performant, and built according to best practices. Evolving Web experts work as an extension of the client’s team of developers, content specialists, and scrum masters to maintain and continuously improve the website.
Evolving Web helped Beneva implement a standard set of building blocks, giving content editors at Beneva more flexibility in creating marketing content, using the Paragraphs module. The website also features region-specific content personalization, data synchronization from a centralized hub, and suite of automated tests, built using Playwright.
Goals
Evolving Web's primary goal was to help Beneva launch a stable Drupal-based website on schedule. To achieve this goal, we proposed a staff augmentation to:
- Ensure the new website was built based on Drupal best practices and industry standards
- Verify that all integrations and the codebase were stable and maintainable
- Work closely with the client's teams, proposing solutions and providing feedback to guide the technical aspects of the project
- Plan workflows in collaboration with the client to meet the deadline successfully
- Transfer Drupal knowledge efficiently, empowering Beneva’s technical teams to develop, configure, and maintain their website as independently as possible
Solutions
Here are some of the solutions Evolving Web brought to the Beneva project:
- Website restructuring by adopting Paragraphs as “building blocks”, giving content editors more flexibility; our team built a prototype to show the client how efficient Paragraphs are and how they became the standard way of building in Drupal.
- Workflow development in the CI/CD system (“continuous integration, continuous delivery”) to automate the delivery process, making it more consistent and reliable, and improving the overall quality of the project
- Smart cache management to serve users with region-specific content without hampering caching, a crucial aspect of website performance
- Daily, automated data synchronization from an external database into Drupal through a special system our team built on top of the Feeds API
- Assistance and guidance provided to Beneva’s technical teams, ensuring the highest efficiency and best practices in Drupal development
- Accessibility adjustments, consultancy, and QA alongside a third-party expert working for the client
- Simplified markup for the main menu, using as much Drupal default structure as possible, to provide the best possible accessibility
- Content integration support for Beneva’s team of content specialists
- Using Playwright (an automated testing tool) to simulate user interactions, test server-side logic, and verify the accuracy of the data, as part of testing restructuring and personalization of content

Results
These are the main results from the collaboration with Beneva:
- Accessibility - The accessibility work resulted in a perfect 100 on the Google Accessibility Check.
- Paragraphs - A total of 20 Paragraph types (content components) that content editors can use to build visually-rich pages.
- Content integration - A complete online user guide for content editors, describing all the content and presentation options available.
- Collaboration - We worked as an extension of the client’s team, generating a high level of collaboration, synergy, and trust that enriches the project.
Drupal was selected as the preferred CMS by the SSQ Insurance team prior to the merger with La Capitale Insurance. This decision was driven by Drupal’s impressive capabilities in ensuring robust security and maintaining rigorous standards that are critical in the insurance sector. Since the merger, Beneva has continued to rely on Drupal for its powerful features that facilitate large-scale automation and advanced data analytics. With its flexible architecture and strong open-source community support, Drupal empowers Beneva to adapt to changing market demands.
Technical Specifications
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Key modules/theme/distribution used: