World Vision
Integrated Magento eCommerce and Drupal CMS
Meet World Vision
World Vision is a Christian relief, development, and advocacy organization dedicated to helping communities overcome poverty and injustice. They work in nearly 100 countries and employ a staff of more than 45,000. The long list of relief programs and donations efforts they facilitate around the world for clean water assistance, famine relief, and natural disaster relief required a website with a robust core capable of handling that amount of content.
When we first began working with them in 2012, World Vision’s online presence was comprised of an outdated UI (User Interface) built on Drupal 6, and a scattering of small, single-purpose websites built by various teams over the years. Without a centralized content management system, making fast, consistent updates to their websites was a major headache.
Ignite!
World Vision’s Ignite program engages with religious school headmasters. World Vision’s Ignite program recently completed a new program marketing site with Bear Group. As the Ignite team's Fall 2019 digital campaign, a microsite was needed for discovery and store full curriculums. In the second phase of the project, we developed a partner portal containing to provide a content, curriculum and a collaboration space for educators.
The Build
Bear Group was engaged in design, content editing, and programming for the new site. We leveraged a base theme “kit” from Worldvision that uses Visual Composer from Wordpress. We worked closely with the Ignite marketing team on the design of the new site, creating a unique and immersive experience. The Ignite team provide all of the raw content, and our content manager helped to edit and organize into a thoughtful information architecture. To create a robust home page experience Bear Group utilized the existing Wordpress CMS Platform integrated with Pantheon and Visual Composer to and helped with deployment on the new section of the World Vision site.
Finding the Right Team
World Vision contracted with a developer to upgrade their systems, provide new integrations with internal tools, and build a CMS (Content Management System) in Drupal 7 to curate their entire online presence. World Vision wasn’t seeing the results they wanted and started looking for new partners. We’d worked with them previously on a few of their smaller websites, and they decided to entrust us with the task of getting the CMS for their main website built and launched.
A CMS With Vision
Once we had a clear picture of World Vision’s needs, we immediately began work building a CMS to meet them. Our first task was to bring all of their content outlets under one roof. Every donation portal and campaign page can now be managed from the website’s administrative back-end. We built an intuitive content interface that allows any member of the content team to make updates—no developers required. We created a powerful editorial workflow solution that captures input from multiple stakeholders, while moving content through the approval process. With their new CMS, World Vision’s web team has the tools they need to write, edit, and publish consistent content across their entire organization.
World Vision Korea
World Vision migrated its main content management systems from Drupal to Wordpress in 2017. As part of that migration, visualcomposer.io was put in place to make spinning up new layouts on Wordpress following their brand guidelines simpler. Wanting their Korean and Chinese websites to migrate to Wordpress as well, World Vision contacted our team to assist with the migration. Using visualcomposer tools (a configurable theme builder to give website administrators more control over the website’s layout and design) we built out new pages and integrated existing content with new content. We also provided training and documentation to World Vision’s team to assist with the transition.
Redesigning WVUS With an Updated Checkout Process
There are numerous ways to give, and World Vision’s Donation website offers users a variety of ways to become involved. For World Vision, maintaining the simplicity of their donation process and their website layout was a priority. World Vision’s Donation website is operated from a Magento® platform for its security, customization, and flexible integration ability. To provide their users with a cleaner, updated web experience, World Vision requested that we implement a new design and fully responsive theme for their Magento platform.
This allowed users on desktops and mobile devices to move through the World Vision website intuitively. We also sunset their dedicated mobile checkout experience, opting instead for a single system which is helpful for their operations team. This also includes new styles both globally and on product pages. Basket, checkout account management, and search were organized to appear cleaner and more balanced with the stylistic elements of the rest of the website.
New category landing page layouts were constructed to feature high impact visuals, in addition to being fully reusable on any category landing page.
Ongoing Development
Even though we started from scratch, we were able to recast the scope of the project and deliver a feature-rich Drupal website three months later. Now, the World Vision CMS acts as the hub of their online organization, informing and empowering users to sponsor children, donate, or learn more about particular crises.
Since launching, we’ve continued to work closely with the World Vision team on a long-term roadmap of Drupal and Magento projects. Those projects have included a campaign-management toolkit for their marketers, as well as a sponsorship portal for helping their international offices communicate with donors. We are honored to be working so closely with an organization that does so much to improve lives around the world.
