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Drupal personalization for Water Research Foundation with Acquia Lift

The Water Research Foundation needed a platform to unify content, boost engagement, and improve user experience. Drupal’s robust features, combined with Acquia’s services, provided the perfect solution for these needs.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)
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Goals

To enhance user engagement, improve content management efficiency, and streamline integration with other systems.

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Requirements

A system that could manage a growing amount of content, provide personalized experiences, and integrate with Acquia’s digital experience tools.

Site infrastructure powered by Drupal and Acquia Cloud

Water Research Foundation’s legacy infrastructure spanned multiple systems, including SharePoint and IMIS for constituent management. Clunky or non-existent integrations meant lots of manual processes and a disconnect between departments across the organization.

A new stack built on Acquia Cloud promised enterprise scalability, along with Acquia DAM to replace SharePoint and IMIS for file storage. Acquia Lift and Content Hub brought website personalization to the mix to bolster the user experience. Finally, Personify replaced Sharepoint and IMIS as the primary user data source to tie everything together.

The resulting challenge was two-fold: first, how to integrate the new Drupal-based platform, and then, how to migrate all of the data and content properly.

Integrating a content taxonomy into a Drupal migration, to connect content and make browsing better

In order to migrate content and files properly, the entire content model was re-architected to support more sophisticated relationships.

Hundreds of taxonomy terms to identify projects and documents were narrowed to core “topics,” creating a better browsing experience and making it easier to search.

Content from SharePoint and IMIS was then programmatically migrated, tagged, and moved into Acquia DAM, which shares files to any system from a single point. Project data, migrated by the client team into Personify, is pulled into Drupal on an ongoing basis to connect people and project information.

Personalized for all users—driving continued engagement

Replatforming content was good, but that wasn’t enough to improve the experience for subscribers. One of the primary project goals was to increase subscriber engagement, or in other words, get more research into the hands of people who could use it.

Features like the ability to follow content, frequent project updates, and subscriptions to “topic hubs” keep subscribers informed of new research without necessitating additional site visits to check out what was new. And when users do visit the site, personalization with Acquia Lift helps users get the most out of each visit.

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Outcome

The project successfully delivered a more user-friendly platform with increased content engagement, higher user retention, and improved subscription rates.

150% Increase in number of returning users

10% Increase in overall content views of resources

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Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was chosen for its flexibility, scalability, and ability to seamlessly integrate with Acquia Cloud and related tools, ensuring efficient content management and personalization.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: