As an international federation of member organisations contributing their resources to a shared development programme, VSO has worked for more than 50 years to address poverty and disadvantage in developing countries. VSO’s approach involves bringing people together to share skills, build capabilities and promote international understanding and action.

Challenges

Timetabled to coincide with its 50th Anniversary, VSO wanted to embrace the potential benefits of adopting a social networking platform to enable its members to engage and share with each other without the constraints of physical boundaries. Alongside an immediate need to provide English-language resource, any technology platform would need to scale to support overseas VSO offices in maintaining a web presence. As with any social network, delivering maximum benefits and ROI would depend heavily on not just developing a sound technical solution, but also on nurturing and sustaining the community.

Delivering a solution

Stage 1 – Developing the strategy 

With a range of stakeholders spread throughout the world, it was essential to develop a planning and implementation strategy that would take into account the demands and wishes of the audience without incurring the substantial costs associated with bringing people together in person. Our Persona Profiling process allowed the knowledge within the VSO team of their stakeholders to be developed into a series of “paper people” who would represent the wider audience throughout the design and build process.

Testing the extensive selection of potential content and commercial offerings that could be delivered by against the personas ensured that the investment in the project was focused on extracting the maximum possible benefits for site visitors, and identified blogging and case studies as high-value content types. With one of the key objectives of the project being the promotion of VSO and the acquisition of new members and volunteers, much of the site content was made available to the general public and registered site users, maximising the SEO potential of providing large volumes of high-quality, freely-accessible content.

Stage 2 – Design & Build 

With the community site being developed as a bolt-on to VSO’s existing corporate website, a brief creative process confirmed the design themes to be carried across to the community areas. The pairing of two sites on two separate platforms also necessitated implementation of a bespoke Single Sign On integration to ensure that users could access both sites with the same credentials and, most importantly, that VSO retained a central view of visitor activity and profiling within their existing CRM solution.

With an Information Architecture, module set, permissions model and registration and profiling process agreed, we delivered an online community and content site on the Drupal Open Source platform, delivering iteratively to enable early review by VSO and to support any desired changes to the requirements and layout.

Sustaining the community 

Although VSO were in a position to provide sufficient human resources to grow and sustain their community, the team had little experience of doing so. We developed a tailored mentoring and training package for VSO, involving direct face-to-face and remote communication between the VSO team and one of our experienced community managers.