The Client

Founders of the no-kill movement, the San Francisco SPCA (SF SPCA) is committed to preventing over-population, rescuing animals, addressing “barriers to veterinary care,” and working to resolve pet behavior issues through education and training.

The Situation

When the SF SPCA came to Cheeky Monkey Media, the needed help developing a new website to replace their current one. The new website needed to provide visitors with better tools and more accessibility for their website.

SF SPCA home page
Why Drupal was chosen: 

The SF SPCA's website was initially using Drupal 6 and CiviCRM, which was serving them fairly well. However, the organization encountered roadblocks when they tried to customize because of CiviCRM.

We decided to stick to Drupal, but upgrade to Drupal 7, and develop the new CRM components all directly within the Drupal ecosystem to simplify the process of customization. To accomplish this, Cheeky Monkey Media utilized the CRM suite built for Drupal RedHen. The RedHen suite provides the building blocks to create a customized CRM utilizing the Drupal framework, which provides a single code base and knowledge set to manage.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The old version of the SF SPCA was powered by a combination of Drupal 6 and CiviCRM. This combination had served them well in the past, but in the few months prior to coming to us, they had experienced some complications because of CiviCRM components and lack of customizability.

Thus, to help SF SPCA turn their website into a better tool for their users and make it more accessible, we identified the following goals:

  • Develop an easy to use CMS for the website powered by Drupal 7
  • Utilize robust CRM tools built into Drupal
  • Make it possible for visitors to sign up for provided courses
  • Make it possible for visitors to donate to SF SPCA
  • Migrate existing content and contacts
  • Utilize responsive website design to work on any device the customer may have

To achieve these goals, we worked in conjunction with Tractor, who was responsible for providing wireframes, design, content strategy, and structure.

Process: How we Delivered on the Client’s Objectives

This project was broken into the three phases:

  1. Planning
  2. Development
  3. Deployment

During the planning phase, Cheeky Monkey Media worked very closely with the SF SPCA to dig deeply into all the above-mentioned goals and features in order to ensure everyone clearly understood the direction the development team needed to go on.

The development phase followed an agile methodology and the development team worked in sprints, which are comprised of sets of accepted features. At the end of each sprint, the team gave a presentation to SF SPCA for review. Following the sprint review, as per the agile methodology, Cheeky Monkey Media worked with SF SPCA to determine if the development from the sprint should be deployed or not.

Cheeky Monkey Media will utilize the Drupal 7 framework as the base to build the content management system SF SPCA needs to manage their website over the life of the new website.

The End Result

We successfully migrated the website to a Drupal 7 framework, which has a better working foundation and allows for simplified cross-platform interactions. This makes it much easier for administrators to manage the website and streamline many of their daily online administrative tasks.

We utilized a responsive design, which gives websites the ability to automatically resize and show appropriate content based on available screen space (based on the device viewing the website). This ensures that users have a seamless experience regardless of what device they are using to view the SF SPCA website.

We used RedHen to allow for the following high-level functionality:

  1. The ability for users to give donations and contributions
  2. The ability to create custom contact profiles with their own set of fields and permissions
  3. The ability to create custom organization profiles with their own set of fields and permissions
  4. The ability to create events and for users to register for events
  5. The ability to track activity and score engagment

In addition, combining RedHen CRM components with SalesForce API suite made it possible for contacts to be pushed and pulled into both systems seamlessly.

And, finally, from 2014 to 2015 (the same time period of the website redesign and development), the average length of stay per animal decreased from 45.4 days to 40.1 days, an 11.7% decrease.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

See above under end result.

Organizations involved: 
Sectors: 
Non-profit