an image of the pacific northwest mountainside

National Indigenous Women's Resource Center

Empowering Nonprofit with Drupal 8

As a non-profit organization, the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center helps provide leadership and resources to help Native women and children. The capabilities of Drupal 8 allow them to grow, inspire, and educate.

SERVICES PROVIDED

Drupal Development

DESIGN PARTNER: DESIGN HOVIE STUDIOS

Meet the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center (NIWRC)

An inspiring showcase of how websites can help make a difference.

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 level of professionalism working with Bear Group has just been phenomenal. We were so pleased with the attention to detail and the follow-up.

Mallory, NIWRC

The Challenge

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.

It made a lot of sense to refresh the look and feel of their website during the course of the migration to Drupal 8, so NIWRC kicked things off with a new logo and brand guidelines. Then our longtime design partner Hovie Hawk worked on designs and layouts to support their new brand direction.

The Solution

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.

The Results

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 their team to share content in different sections of 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 content 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.

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, NIWRC