Swedish Medical Foundation
A Custom Drupal Website
The Swedish Medical Center Foundation (SMCF) is the fundraising arm of the largest nonprofit medical provider in the Seattle area. The SMCF manages a large web presence that includes both their main site and dedicated sites for specific fundraising efforts. Given their large online footprint, reliable hosting plays a critical role in their web team’s success—and in 2010, that success was in jeopardy.
The SMCF sites had been set up, many years before, on a homegrown hosting solution. As the foundation’s scope grew, so did their demands on their websites. Soon, the SMCF’s web team was spending a huge amount of time and resources trying to keep their servers secure, stable, and up-to-date.
The tipping point came when the SMCF was preparing to build a site for the Campaign for Swedish, a multi-year fundraising effort in honor of the hospital’s centennial. The goal for the campaign was to raise $100 million over seven years. With a campaign of that size and importance on the horizon, the SMCF’s web team did not want to worry about whether their hosting solution was up to the task.
When the foundation approached us, they were looking for two things: First, a web ops team that could solve their hosting problem, and second, a development partner to help them improve and expand the SMCF family of sites.
A Custom Drupal CMS Solution
The SMCF sites were all being run with Drupal, so our first step was to move them over to Acquia—a managed hosting service designed exclusively for Drupal. This immediately removed the burden of maintenance from the foundation’s web team. In addition, we set up their websites to run as a Drupal multi-site. That made it possible for all of the SMCF sites to share a common Drupal code base, reducing the maintenance load even further.
A Complete Refresh
In addition to overhauling the front-end of the SMCF main site to a new mobile responsive design (provided by Design Hovie Studios), we also brought it forward from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.
Development for Microsites
The Campaign for Swedish website was the impetus for upgrading their hosting situation, but we ended up working with SMCF on a succession of related development projects:
Campaign for Swedish
This was our first project built on the new Acquia platform. The Drupal website served as the online home for the campaign, which met its $100 million goal well before the deadline. The project included an integration with Blackbaud, SMCF’s nonprofit management software.
Summer Run & Walk
Built in support of an annual fundraising event for ovarian cancer, this site followed closely in the footsteps of the Campaign for Swedish site. The site includes a visual tracker to display the donations collected so far—a piece of functionality that we’d developed for the first campaign site.
Seattle Brain Cancer Walk
Like the Summer Run, the Seattle Brain Cancer Walk happens every year. We built a site to manage registration, donations, and communications in support of the event.
Updates
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Drupal integration with Blackbaud.
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Customized Drupal modules for the visual tracking of donations.
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Website tools for managing event registration, donations, and user communications.
Improved Hosting
Since the day we moved the SMCF web team onto Acquia, they haven’t had to think about their hosting once. With that roadblock out of the way, we’ve been proud to build the foundation a beautiful suite of sites that help support their mission to save lives.