GALA
Custom Drupal Website
GALA, Globalization and Localization Association, is known for its status as a leading trade association within the language industry, providing a community of language professionals with tools for networking, training, and information collaboration opportunities. Because of the distributive nature of the GALA organization, their website is a critical communication and interaction tool within their membership. Many of the website’s features, such as its Video on Demand, conference registrations, and posting ability, are key benefits to members.
In January 2015, GALA contacted Bear Group with plans for an ambitious project to redesign their website and make it fully responsive, consolidate its administration, and better serve their members online. Our work with GALA began with several discovery and scoping meetings over a six week period to map the precise needs in order to build the full GALA member experience. It was quickly apparent that GALA’s largest issue was the several separate platforms running and operating from a hybrid of different systems.
GALA also wanted to update their payment systems to better support subscription renewals to make their member’s annual subscription transaction a cleaner, more automated process.
The Solution: The Perfect Situation for a Custom Drupal CMS
An interesting aspect of GALA, compared with other typical industry associations, is the large amount of content members directly publish. GALA’s new website would need support for an integrated experience that included such things as member profiles, member content publishing, blogs, community, management of membership, management of GALA publication, webinars, Video on Demand, event registration, email automation, and payment processing for both subscriptions and one-time payments.
Consolidating GALA's Web Presence
Because content publishing is such a core aspect of GALA’s organization, it didn’t make sense to connect their systems through Association Management Software (AMS) or to componentize into too many third-party tools. For a website whose main priority is its content publishing, the optimal decision was to orient their site around a Content Management System (CMS): a customized Drupal website. We simplified their administration tools, condensing everything that their several platforms had been doing for them into one Drupal website - including the management of their membership’s data.
Integrating MarTech Tools
In order to conduct their transactions, online as well as offline, within their various tiers of membership we moved GALA to Braintree Payments. Braintree provided a secure method of integrated payments within the GALA website, and supported multiple subscription tiers and tokenized payments.
A significant part of consolidating GALA’s old systems was dedicated to migrating their data to their new Drupal website. This migration and data mapping represented a significant undertaking, and included reformatting their data in order for it to cleanly fit in the new system.
Updates
-
Integration with Braintree.
-
Consolidation of GALA's entire web presence within a single Drupal CMS.
Building a Responsive Website
Bear Group reached out to Hovie Studios to design the GALA website look and feel. They designed dozens of page layouts, and provided a mobile responsive design to support access across a wide range of digital devices.