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.
By Northern Commerce on
Looking to increase funding, volunteers, and athlete engagement across the country, Special Olympics Canada (SOC) was under pressure to remove limitations and put the organization in a more favourable position to achieve its strategic goals.
A pre-redesign assessment of the national site determined that the four year old site was nearing end of life. It was content poor, not fully responsive, had an overall negative search experience, and was lacking showcase opportunities for campaigns and sponsors. Chapter sites did not fare much better in the assessment. Most were found to be experiencing many if not all of the same limitations as the national site plus varying degrees of brand conformity and barriers relating to athlete sign up or event registration.
SOC opened an RFP process to locate a vendor agency to design, build and launch a new website. SOC was interested in either a stand-alone site solution or a multi-site system shared with chapters.
Northern won the RFP with its proposed “shared site” Drupal solution, believing that building the site using organic groups with one code base deployed for both the national and participating chapter sites would provide the most value to the organization.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Using the open source development platform Drupal offered benefits to both the national body and the regional chapters. Special Olympics Canada decided to go with Drupal after learning the following:
- Zero cost licensing, due to open source Drupal platform
- Shared website model increases brand consistency across the 12 provinces and territories.
- The shared model also provides the ability to share content across the national and regional versions of the site.
- Drupal offers a strong bilingual development platform.
- Granular user roles and permission controls provide different access rights for regional chapters and the national team.
- The Drupal framework provides great support for video and social media integration.
- Creating a responsive solution will improve the user experience regardless of hardware and technology preferences.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
About the Organization
Established in 1969, the Canadian chapter of this international movement is dedicated to enriching the lives of Canadians with an intellectual disability through the transformative power and joy of sport. Operating out of sport clubs in 12 provincial and territorial Chapters, this grassroots movement reaches beyond the sphere of sport to empower individuals, change attitudes and build communities. From two-year-olds to mature adults, more than 40,000 athletes with an intellectual disability are registered in Special Olympics year-round programs across Canada. They are supported by more than 19,000 volunteers, including more than 14,000 trained coaches.
Site Audience
Special Olympics Canada website audience is a diverse group of stakeholders, including current and prospective Special Olympics athletes and their family members, coaches, volunteers, donors, partner organizations and sponsors, and staff members at each of the 12 Provincial and Territorial Chapters.
Serving as the national voice for the Special Olympics movement, the national site is multi-purpose, incorporating education, information and fundraising information. Chapter websites are more transactional in their focus on fundraising, athlete and volunteer registration in local programs, and event promotion. The website functions partially as a “gateway” to the Chapters for current and potential athletes, volunteers, coaches and event participants. Providing information at the national level is still a key function, especially for members of the general public, the media, government and corporate partners and other funders, and staff.
Solution
Northern won the RFP bid with its proposed “shared site” solution, believing that building the site using organic groups with one code base deployed for both the national and participating chapter sites would provide the most value to the organization.
The result is a bilingual Drupal 8 product that is fully accessible, responsive, and negates the pain points of brand compliance, navigation, technical function and mobile responsiveness discovered during the pre-redesign assessment. The national site launched first with participating chapters close behind through a single top-level install. Feedback from the chapters during Drupal training was overwhelmingly positive – highlighting the ease of use and attractive interface.
Other benefits of the shared site solution:
- Better consistency in site design, branding, and function across all Canadian websites
- Access to content from Chapters and local communities without duplication of work
- Ability to provide more support and shared solutions/suggestions with Chapters
- More consistency in cost of websites across organization, ability to predict costs
- Access to back-end data / analytics for web traffic, visitor demographics, etc.
- Possibility of cost efficiencies for larger contracts for hosting, maintenance, etc.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Building the site using organic groups creates one master site, at the national level, and unique chapter sites at the regional level. This model uses one code base and gives the SOC team the ability to publish, and share, content at both the national and regional level.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Sports
