Highlights

About Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation

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. Their generous volunteers and donors are their support system.

What the foundation wanted to achieve

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 these, it offers education workshops, informational programs, and drives fundraising events to enable research, support, and advocacy. These are catered to different stakeholders, therefore, were spread across multiple microsites running on an enterprise Blackbaud. The Foundation wanted a solution that enabled them to manage these digital assets easily, eliminating redundant efforts. They wanted to bring all the microsite on one platform and get an enhanced editorial and user experience.

The Challenge

There were multiple issues with the existing CMS, starting with a lack of a user-friendly backend, which restricted quick updates on the microsites or implementation of a uniform theme and structure across these. Moreover, the Foundation is an ever-growing family, which means the involvement of multiple contributors. The lack of user-based access for contributors left little scope in maintaining uniformity and complicated the entire operation furthermore. In order to eliminate these roadblocks and ensure a smooth digital ecosystem, the Foundation reached out to the Srijan.

We were tasked with analyzing these sites and defining a strategy to migrate these sites to Drupal under one umbrella main site before the existing CMS contract was due for renewal. This made the project even more exacting as there was no scope of delays and missing the deadline would have nullified the entire chain of effort. The need was to formulate a content migration strategy that allowed smooth migration of the existing (structured and unstructured) content within a short time.

How we did it

The task was broken down into multiple phases by prioritizing the tasks to meet the stringent deadline. Our agile practices enabled better coordination among our experts and the Foundation staff. This greatly reduced the possibility of redundant iterations and enabled us to build requirements that could be deployed using the fastest, most optimized technology solutions. The content modeling strategy and design application architecture were defined after a detailed analysis of the microsites in the existing CMS. 

Multiple solutions were utilized to deliver a platform that aligned with the Foundation’s vision. Automated content migration, using Drupal’s migration API, minimized content re-creation efforts. User-based access enabled uniform and seamless content management by different stakeholders thus overcoming geographical silos. Leveraging Google schema tags and other SEO best practices, the web platform achieved an organic boost via better content visibility. Seamless integration with Cloudflare ensured consistent response times even after the addition of all microsites.

Adding new features or enhancing existing ones became extremely efficient, faster, and easier with Acquia environments. Acquia BLT was utilized for end-to-end automated deployment. Using Acquia Cloud, Cloudflare and ELK enabled easy and efficient resource monitoring and quicker issue resolution.  The powerful Acquia SOLR, enables streamlining the search and has empowered end-users like patients, healthcare professionals and caregivers to quickly find their desired page with a simple keyword search. 

What we delivered

With spirited collaboration and cooperation between the Foundation and Srijan teams, we were able to migrate multiple microsites within the stipulated timeline. The key benefits drawn included:

• The Foundation’s main site now provides a unified view of their content with uniform themes and structure; seamless content management with user-based access; and quicker time to market content with reusable components.
• End users can swiftly access content owing to a better data structure.
• Post-migration, pages per session (for one of the micro-sites) doubled; and the overall bounce rate was reduced by 24% year over year.

This stabilized the entire web structure and has saved the time and effort of the volunteers associated with the Foundation. Clearer visibility of the overall vision and aim would benefit the Foundation in the longer run, by motivating more people to join as volunteers and maximize the efforts of making lives better.

Check out our work here:

Website: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/

MICROSITES under a single site:

Clinical Trials Community: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/clinical-trials-community/

Campus Connection: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/campus-connection

EMR Search Tool: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/emr/emr-ibd-education-tool

Find a medical expert: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/find-a-medical-expert

Just Like Me IBD: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/justlikeme

Managing the Cost of IBD: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/managing-the-cost-of-ibd

Step therapy: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/get-involved/be-an-advocate/steptherapy

Find a support group: https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/find-a-support-group