Victims Support helps over 200,000 victims of crimes, traffic accidents, and calamities in The Netherlands in an external crisis community. It also has an intranet of over 4,000 volunteers that support victims in processing the event and, where possible, offer emotional, practical and legal assistance. The organization recognized that a listening ear is not enough.

It offers a network of support which is facilitated by proactive community management. Find more information on the Open Social showcase.

This case is based on the award-winning Open Social project from 2017 in category Tools and Apps.

Victims Support The Netherlands
Why Drupal was chosen: 

Drupal was chosen for its flexibility and customizable features. The platform was tailored according to the needs of the victims, with a special focus on heightened security and privacy.

Moreover, the Drupal 8 community distribution Open Social matches many the goals of the project; it's innovative, uses the latest technology, and will be supported and maintained for many years to come. The distribution already contained most of the required features for the project, including events, profiles, groups and moderation tools for community managers.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Goal: Victims Support The Netherlands wants to help 50% more people online than they did in 2014. In order to achieve this goal, they were looking for a new online community platform to replace the outdated public forum functionality.

Their new Victims Support 2.0 program has the following goals:

  • Reach a larger number of victims online.
  • Facilitate people with new online tools to help themselves.
  • Facilitate people to help each other.

Requirements: Victims Support needed a community platform that has extra safety standards to guarantee the safety of victims. Open Social adheres to strict security standards and implemented extra measures such as reducing the personal data stored and data encryption. All data is hosted on a European Sovereign cloud of Microsoft Azure in Germany. The data is hosted with the strictest data protection measures, certificates, and requirements of the EU, as well as key international standards.

Outcome: Victims Support ha screated a safe space for victims online using Open Social. The following measures were used for saftey and support:

Single sign-on
One set of login credentials can be used to access multiple applications. For this, a special implementation was done to connect via a special proxy to Active Directory, iDIN and later DigiD.

Groups
Site managers can create hidden groups that are invite-only. Closed groups are only accessible after doing an intake with the community manager. Only public groups are visible from the outside. With this, victims can choose how much safety and anonymity they want.

Structure
The community platform is built so that users can't change the structure by adding extra groups and events, directing the focus on helping each other and being able to share your story and read or comment on others.

Disasters
When a disaster occurs, Victims Support can create a secure and private emergency sub-community within Open Social. It's a ‘critical system’ that connects victims, families, government, police, and volunteers to exchange information and get support.

There is a firm ambition to help many more of the 4 million people that become victims in the Netherlands.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 8.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Simplesamlphp_auth and Externalauth were chosen for SAML SSO login possibilities. SSO login ensured that only one set of login details were needed across different platforms for the victims and volunteers. DBEE is used to encrypt the stored email addresses in the database to ensure absolute privacy of user data. The API Key Manager is used to secure incoming REST API calls with an HMAC token.

Community contributions: 
  • Group default route management
  • Pathauto feature (URL Alias)
  • Predefined styles in WYSIWYG
  • Quickjoin groups
  • Nickname feature
  • Hiding of profile fields (GDPR)
  • Smaller hero section for the landing page
Organizations involved: 
Victims Support Persona
Nickname search in victims Support
Sectors: 
Non-profit