Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Johnson & Johnson’s CaringCrowd® is a crowdfunding platform built to support health initiatives anywhere in the world and is free of charge. CaringCrowd® empowers the passionate people working with non-profits to improve underprivileged and neglected communities and is 100% dedicated to public health. As health is a critical matter, projects are reviewed by a panel of experts before being posted on the site. Since its launch, CaringCrowd® has mobilized over $370,000 in pledges, funding 40 projects estimated to touch over 200,000 lives. Funded projects have included burn centers, nutrition for HIV+ children, hand washing campaigns, supplying orphanages, pediatric heart surgery, river blindness, ultrasound units, and sex education. CaringCrowd® is becoming a powerful voice that brings to the public’s attention the importance of public health, the awareness that preventing disease for so many is within our reach, and the view that so much can be achieved through a bit of caring, a bit of foresight, and a bit of investment.
Johnson & Johnson created the CaringCrowd platform because it was responding to a need: non-profits working on important and essential public health projects around the world are finding it increasingly difficult to raise funds. The platform unites several strong points of J&J (i.e., IT capability, brand recognition, ability to convene stakeholders, and marketing) to several strong points of grassroots non-profits (i.e., local knowledge, local people, agility, lean, and the ability to cross the “Last Mile”), giving them a better chance to succeed and to substantially propel them forward in the rapidly rising trend of crowdfunding.
Below we discuss our choice of framework and the reasons why.
Why Drupal was chosen:
This project required high level of customization especially in the areas of project organization and user management. Based on our experience, we know that Drupal is a powerful framework that provides out-of-the-box features that can be easily extended and customized. This meant we could use Drupal’s existing features, yet customize the code where necessary. Also, Drupal’s offering of general-purpose, high-quality modules - such as Workbench Moderation - meant that we could employ code more quickly while meeting business requirements.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
CaringCrowd® is a crowdfunding platform fully dedicated to improving public health around the world. The platform allows NGOs/non-profits to submit public health-related projects to receive donations. Organizations and projects are moderated by advisors and administrators to ensure they meet the CaringCrowd requirements. Once published, any user can register to the site and make pledges for the projects. If a project reaches its funding goal during the grace period, the project receives the donations. Otherwise, all pledges are canceled.
CaringCrowd’s website has recently gone through a major redesign. The website was originally built with Drupal and this redesign required significant changes to some functionalities that had been previously implemented. Because most components are well-separated in modules, this could be achieved under an aggressive timeline with strong results.
Apart from changing how the site looked and behaved from an end-user perspective, we also had to replace the project donation payment system, which now uses Stripe. Many contributed modules helped in this major refactoring task, such as Stripe API and Encrypt.
At the end of the day, we were able to deliver the revamped platform with a new, fully responsive layout and a more flexible and reliable payment system. Ultimately, this contributed to funding over 37 public health projects that positively impact the health of individuals around the globe.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Workbench Moderation: We needed to provide moderation for organizations and projects that were created by end users before they were published and open for donations. Workbench Moderation simply implements a rich and flexible framework for nodes moderation in Drupal that fulfilled our requirements.
Stripe API: We needed to implement a donation payment system using Stripe. This module provided a nice basic API between our custom business rules/code and the stripe-php library.
Encrypt: Simple symmetric encryption framework that allowed securing sensitive payment data.
Google Analytics / Metatag / XML sitemap: Ready to use and offered complete solutions for most of our SEO needs.
Search API / Solr search / Acquia Search for Search API: Provided easy implementation of an Apache SOLR-based search service in Acquia.
Token: Provided a centralized way to manage token creation and replacement throughout the system. It is very useful for our multiple e-mail subject / body templates for different contexts.
Mollom: Replaced our initial CAPTCHA solution for user registration providing automatic and adaptive spam / profanity protection.
Shorten URLs: URLs used on sharing services (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc) were required to be short URLs. We used the shorten module module that provided a ready to use URL shortener services integration - Google URL Shortener in our case.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
Aline Portella
Andrea Cintia Strabelli Goncalves
Diego Ronchesel
Felipe Pinton
Gabriel Franco de Faria Mello
Lilian Bahia
Michelle Bento
Vinicius Neves
Stephen Ruhmel
Derek Fetzer
Sectors:
Healthcare
Non-profit
Comments
Typo found
This project excellently showcases Drupal. In reading the project description, I found a typo in the company name. See first sentence in the project description. Replace the 'd' in CarindCrowd with a 'g'.
Thanks Christine. Fixed.
Thank you very much Christine.
Drupal once again was perfect for us. This project was a pride for our company.
Thank you very much for your note. It has been fixed.
Good work.
Regards.