• Non-Profit Case Study

Nonprofit

Nonprofit

Overview

Nonprofit organizations and international NGOs today exist in a “survival of the fittest” environment, competing for resources as local and global economies contract. Meeting the “double bottom line” of financial and social returns requires programs to operate with reduced infrastructure: smaller budgets, fewer people, and less time. 

Core Challenges

  • Nonprofits must routinely make critical investments under tight budgets. Choosing technology systems that are the most compatible, affordable, and sustainable over the long term is crucial.
  • Staff, stakeholders, and constituents must work in harmony to drive social change. Motivating teams and sustaining lasting engagement is central to meeting nonprofit goals.
  • Maintaining stable technology systems provides nonprofits with a vital foundation for communication and delivery of services, but must be done using simple, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions.
  • Assessing how current technologies might meet a specific nonprofit’s goals can be difficult as busy stakeholders and staff wear many hats in their day-to-day work.

Our Approach

With over 15 years’ experience in technology assistance and public speaking in the nonprofit sector, FivePaths is recognized as a leading NGO and nonprofit technology service provider. We stay abreast of the latest developments in nonprofit technology, identifying the best solutions to meet the needs of nonprofits large and small. Partners include advocacy, membership, association, human service, political, and educational organizations.

Profile: International Rivers

International Rivers' mission is to protect rivers and defend the rights of communities that depend on them. It opposes destructive dams and encourages better ways of meeting people's needs for water, energy, and flood protection.

Challenges

International Rivers hosts a vast array of text, image, and multimedia content that is both invaluable to researchers and important in promoting campaign support and action. Years of website growth, increasingly multilingual content, and increases in blogger and other content contributors created an urgent need to upgrade the organization’s website’s design and architecture. International Rivers’ new website needed to support more complex relationships between all available content, as well as a more simplified interface that could continue to scale as the organization’s website grows. International Rivers also needed a partner who could handle a very complex legacy website.

Solutions and Impacts

FivePaths partnered with International Rivers to determine the best strategy for upgrading its Drupal 5 website to Drupal 7, and to accommodate the expansion of relationships between all of its online content. We conducted a comprehensive audit of the existing content, and developed an architecture that allows maximum flexibility and integration across content types, one that could help support both campaigns and issue areas. We mapped and migrated all content to the new site, allowing the team to focus on content updates and new content creation and saving them weeks of time and effort in the process. We provided a multilingual site solution to allow the continued expansion of international content. 

The new system is built entirely in standard, well-adopted Drupal CMS technology, helping to minimize upkeep and upgrade costs in the future. Improved graphical tools make it easy to build complex relationships between videos, photos, maps, actions, articles, and more. International Rivers uses a combination of in-house staff and FivePaths to ensure the software is up-to-date, and new features can be quickly defined and implemented to support rapidly changing program needs.

Visit site: http://www.internationalrivers.org