Sector(s)
Equal Opportunity Community Initiative (EOCI) is an international nonprofit, a volunteer-based one, committed to providing precisely what its name promises: equal access for all children.
"Access" to an adequate standard of living, medical services, and education.
"The sense of belonging they receive empowers them to move through the world with confidence, attain upward social mobility and make positive impacts on the world we share." (https://www.equalopp.org)
In this respect, EOCI preaches and practices the "100% philosophy" towards the donations that they collect: all funds go, in their entirety, to the underserved communities they help.
Also, they've implemented a holistic approach to their investments. Meaning that every type of need is closely connected to all the other ones in the hierarchy of needs:
Essential life needs must be addressed before the educational ones. An effective training program needs to be set in place before anyone could expect to integrate future young adults in the labour market and so on...
When did OPTASY and Drupal come into the picture?
When EOCI realized that it was crucial to meet the needs of their website visitors, as well — potential future donors and future volunteers.
When they realized that the better the experience that they delivered on their website, the easier it would be to streamline their efforts. To tell their story and communicate their mission to a wider group of people.
We could not have been more honoured that they chose us to contribute to their "community of world-changers".
About the project
The Challenge
To redesign the organization's website in Drupal 8, from the ground up and increase conversions. Their old website was a Joomla-based one (a fairly old version of Joomla), with low traffic and a low conversion rate.
And this meant:
- full-stack website development in Drupal 8
- website performance tuning
- optimizing the information architecture: they needed their content to be easier to find and sift through and the page layout to be cleaner and clearer
- creating a new UX design
In a nutshell: EOCI assigned us to re-platform the old Joomla website and to restructure the whole site architecture so that visitors could easily find and engage with the content.
Other project-specific requests included a newsletter functionality and a mobile version of their website, as well.
“Our website was outdated and lacked traffic as well as conversions. It was built in 2010 and wasn’t up to date with our new programs. As a nonprofit, it’s not easy to communicate your story and mission in the timeframe when someone’s on your website. Our old website wasn’t telling our story because we’d expanded in many ways. We needed a product that was mobile-friendly, capture the user, and convert them to take action.” Sean Kelly, Executive Director
OPTASY's Solution
Most of our work to redesign the information architecture was centred on one powerful module: Paragraphs.
We triggered its (super)powers to come up with a cleaner and much more flexible page layout that:
- editors could easily manage on their own
- provided a better content experience to the website visitors
Next, we upgraded it to Bootstrap 4. And since the EOCI team valued "looks" and performance equally, we knew that the resulting website had to be as visually-appealing as fast.
So, we created a whole new theme for their Drupal 8 website to align with:
- the optimized page layout
- the more effective information architecture
- the speed "injected" into those web pages.
Next, we implemented the required newsletter functionality using the Simplenews module and implemented a mobile version of the website, as well.
Why Drupal was chosen
For a few obvious reasons:
- Our client needed to present the content on its website in a simplified format, backed by an easy-to-use and more intuitive navigation. With its robust content features, Drupal 8 made restructuring the content and the information architecture, much easier.
- The Paragraphs module: a reason in itself to opt for Drupal whenever you need to create an intuitive and visually-pleasing page layout. Which was the case in this project.
- Drupal is just... fast. And fast-loading pages is what the EOCI wanted. To give their old website a significant performance boost that would grant them more traffic… more conversions.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Paragraphs
By breaking down content into multiple reusable components, it was easy for us to put together a new clean, neatly structured layout.
Not to mention that it is easier now for EOCI's editorial team to create their own page layouts by simply mixing and matching those components.
Views Reference Field
It enabled us to embed views into our Paragraphs bundle.
Webform
It was the most effective way to create custom web forms for this new Drupal 8 site.
Simplenews
It helped us implement the newsletter functionality.
The Result
"The site’s beautiful and performing exactly how we’d hoped it would. The company that manages our Google Ads has found that our conversions have increased. The traffic has remained the same, but the amount of time users spend on the website and the number of actions taken has gone up about ten-fold. That’s what we set out to do exactly. We’re seeing an ROI in a short amount of time: That’s a success for us completely.” Sean Kelly, Executive Director
Our efforts turned into a:
- fast
- visually-appealing
- easy to navigate
- engaging
... Drupal 8 website.
One that throws a brighter spotlight on this organization's work.
A website that's become a more welcoming meeting place for all those willing to ... take action.
