How Elevated Third and Acquia Drive Customer Success with Drupal 8

At Acquia, our partners are thought leaders, storytellers, and tastemakers. We are proud to partner with the leading digital agencies, development shops, and system integrators that are driving the future of digital. Partner Success Stories highlight partners who not only build and extend their business with Acquia and Drupal, but create significant value for their clients through an emphasis on customer success.

Elevated Third is a digital agency that specializes in Drupal development, digital strategy, digital design, and user experience. For more than a decade, Elevated Third has been helping Fortune 500 companies, startups and nonprofits alike turn big ideas into engaging digital experiences. Elevated Third was founded in 2004, and is headquartered in Denver, Colorado.

Drupal is the only CMS that Elevated Third’s leverages for development, and their team fields a range of experience in Drupal. Not only are they an Acquia Preferred Partner, but the agency also has six Drupal certified developers and two of the world's Drupal Grandmasters in house. Due to Elevated Third’s extensive Drupal expertise, Colorado’s leading workers compensation insurer, Pinnacol Assurance, selected the agency to spearhead the relaunch of its flagship site in Drupal 8.

The Challenge

Pinnacol Assurance needed a website that reflected the company’s enduring commitment to first-class service. After learning more about Pinnacol’s goals for the project, Elevated Third pinpointed three major objectives that needed to be achieved in the site revamp:

1. Users needed to be able to easily find information surrounding worker compensation policies.
2. A highly engaging website would require frequent content updates and revisions. The ability for marketing teams to edit content needed to be streamlined and easy.
3. The new flagship site needed to promote a seamless user experience that answered the individual needs of diverse audiences.

The Approach

As a Drupal-specific development agency, Elevated Third works exclusively with Acquia as a platform service partner. Acquia Cloud provided Elevated Third with the stability, performance and security required to build Pinnacol Assurance’s new site in Drupal 8. Elevated Third selected Drupal 8 for its multilingual capabilities, content authoring workflow, and mobile-first capabilities that are built into core.

In order to make worker compensation policies easier to find, Elevated Third helped Pinnacle develop an information hub that is now immediately accessible on the home page. Drupal 8 provides an improved authoring experience, allowing Pinnacol’s digital teams to update featured content, such as their information hub, with ease. Drupal 8 also enables consistent deployment of new configurations across environments to ensure that every content refresh is smooth. Finally, with a state-of-the-art Drupal 8 CMS in their toolbox, Elevated Third was able to organize persona-specific logins and landing pages to promote a seamless user experience for all audiences. Pinnacol supports a variety of key stakeholders, including employees, employers, agents, insurance providers, job seekers and community members. Elevated Third aided Pinnacol in developing intuitive site navigation to ensure that each audience can access content that is specific for their needs.

The Results

Pinnacol Assurance’s new flagship site is simple, clean, and comprehensive. It prioritizes user experience and facilitates brand affinity. The new site communicates a renewed commitment to service in the digital age, and has already witnessed a decrease in bounce rate.

"The Pinnacol project was lengthy and complex, we had very specific problems that required creative solutions. Elevated Third developed a high performing, enterprise-level website that continues to exceed our expectations.” - Hilary Miller, Brand and Marketing Director, Pinnacol Assurance

Why Acquia?

Elevated Third partners with Acquia because they consider the team to be highly knowledgeable and responsive. Acquia works with Elevated Third to offer strategic solutions that are specifically tailored to the client. Additionally, working with a team that is familiar with the intricacies and requirements of Drupal is extremely valuable when it comes to troubleshooting and performance optimization.

The Acquia Cloud platform also provides Elevated Third’s team with a consistent set of development workflow tools that saves time, money and headaches throughout the lifecycle of the site. Acquia's out-of-the-box developer workflow allowed the team at Elevated Third to reallocate time that would have been spent on infrastructure setup and maintenance with another vendor, into actual development work. By using Acquia, Elevated Third’s clients spent less time worrying about their platform, and can focus more time developing functionality that is key to the success of the site.

As Elevated Third has grown and taken on larger enterprise-level Drupal projects, their exemplary work has earned them the rank of an Acquia Preferred Partner. Acquia is proud to partner with leading agencies like Elevated Third to develop elegant solutions that inspire and engage audiences, and create significant value for customers.