Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation
Highlights
The Foundation wanted to bring multiple microsites onto a single platform while providing an enhanced editorial and user experience.
A difficult-to-use CMS with an expiring contract meant that the Foundation needed to work quickly to migrate its sites to a new platform.
Drupal CMS, Acquia Cloud Platform
Adding new features or enhancing existing ones became extremely efficient, faster and easier, and overall bouncerate decreased by 24%.
The Client
The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation is a volunteer-driven, non-profit organization, working tirelessly to improve the quality of life of those suffering from Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. It has been a leader in inflammatory bowel disease research to find cures. The Foundation has been empowering patients and caregivers and educating health professionals for over 50 years.
The Situation
The mission of the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation is to cure Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis and to improve the quality of life of children and adults affected by these diseases. To achieve this, it offers workshops, programs and events to facilitate research, support and advocacy. Because these activities were catered to different stakeholders, they were spread across multiple microsites running on an enterprise Blackbaud.
The Foundation wanted a solution that allowed it to easily manage these digital assets, eliminating redundant efforts. It wanted to bring all the microsites onto a single platform while providing an enhanced editorial and user experience.
The Challenge
The existing CMS suffered from multiple issues, starting with a lack of a user-friendly back end, which restricted quick updates on the microsites or implementation of a uniform theme and structure. Additionally, the lack of user-based access for contributors left little scope in maintaining uniformity and complicated the entire operation. Migrating the sites before the existing CMS contract was due for renewal meant that the team needed to work quickly to ensure a smooth transition.
The Solution
The Foundation reached out to Srijan, who defined a content modeling strategy and design application architecture after a detailed analysis of the microsites in the existing CMS. Automated content migration, using Drupal’s migration API, minimized content re-creation efforts and user-based access enabled uniform and seamless content management by different stakeholders, thus overcoming geographical silos. And seamless integration with Cloudflare ensured consistent response times even after the addition of all microsites.
The Results
The Foundation’s main site now provides a unified view of content with uniform themes and structure; seamless content management with user-based access; and quicker time to market content with reusable components. Using Acquia environments, adding new features or enhancing existing ones became extremely efficient, faster and easier. Using Acquia Cloud Platform, Cloudflare and ELK enabled easy and efficient resource monitoring and quicker issue resolution. In addition, the powerful Acquia SOLR has streamlined search and empowered end-users like patients, healthcare professionals and caregivers to quickly find their desired page with a simple keyword search.
Post-migration, pages per session for one of the microsites doubled and the overall bouncerate was reduced by 24% year over year.