National Indigenous Women's Resource Center
Drupal 9 website for a nonprofit organization working to end violence against Native women and children
The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) is a Native-led nonprofit organization dedicated to ending violence against Native women and children. The NIWRC provides national leadership in ending gender-based violence in tribal communities by lifting up the collective voices of grassroots advocates and offering culturally-grounded resources, technical assistance and training, and policy development to strengthen tribal sovereignty.
The website plays a significant role in helping the NIWRC achieve its vision by providing all types of resources to the communities they serve, but their previous Drupal 7 website lacked flexibility and was difficult to manage.
A Fresh Start
It made a lot of sense to refresh the look and feel of their website during the course of the migration to Drupal 9, so NIWRC kicked things off with a new logo and brand guidelines then our longtime design partner Design Hovie Studios worked on designs and layouts to support their new brand direction.
Drupal is a leader in the nonprofit website CMS space because of its flexibility. In this case it was particularly beneficial to be able to set up content types and fields for the specific resources NIWRC has available. Based on how NIWRC organized its content and materials, there were 10 content types and 20 section types needed for the new site.
The ability to build pages using sections in Drupal allows for a wide variety of layout possibilities. For example, a section was created that supports the use of background videos along with image slideshows to be used interchangeably on the NIWRC homepage as well as top sections in other landing pages.
Robust Taxonomy
The NIWRC website makes use of Drupal's robust taxonomy capabilities with close to 700 taxonomy terms connecting content pieces across the website.
This allows for their team to more easily share content in different sections in the website such as resources, pages, events, and more.
Footer blocks dynamically pull in related content based on their established content taxonomy, and even their Restoration Magazine editions — like the Restoration Magazine February 2021 edition — come together based on taxonomy terms.
Magazine-Style Page Layouts
The magazine content itself takes advantage of customized sections. This is a neat feature in Drupal where a page layout can be defined in different ways via a configuration change in the admin.
Each article within an issue of Restoration Magazine, for example, is associated with a section and will dynamically pull in the magazine download option, other content within each of the sections, and additional information for readers.
Other Features
- Speakers Bureau speaker finder
- Donation links that can be embedded within any page or section
- Speaking our Truth: Podcast for Change embed on landing page
- Custom color selector for sections (via dropdown, so no CSS needed)
- Taxonomy pages that self-build and inherit styling
“A lot of thought was put in by the Bear Group team in terms of the ease of adding content to our Drupal website. I've worked with websites for a long time and on all sorts of different platforms — this is as easy as it gets.”
Tang Cheam, Director of Information and Technology, NIWRC“Our website is so much easier to use than it was before. We're so happy with how this all turned out and very appreciative of being able to work with Bear Group on this project.”
Mallory Adamski, Director of Communications and Advancement, NIWRCWe are so thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with the NIWRC team on this project.