Drupal + Acquia Development
Drupal personalization for Water Research Foundation with Acquia Lift
Drupal personalization for Water Research Foundation with Acquia Lift
Global scientific organization specializing in coordinating and promoting the research of freshwater for utility use
150%
Increase in number of returning users within the first two weeks of launch
10%
Increase in overall content views of projects, research and case studies
Water Research Foundation is a scientific organization specializing in coordinating and promoting the research of freshwater for utility use. Their work spreads across six continents with 2000+ projects valued at over $700 million.
After merging with another research organization, Water Research Foundation needed to consolidate web properties and improve the subscriber experience to expand the global impact of its research. To do that, they needed a top-tier Acquia Partner well-versed in their products and platform.
Assembling the Tech Stack
Site infrastructure powered by Drupal and Acquia Cloud
Site infrastructure powered by Drupal and Acquia Cloud
Water Research Foundation’s legacy infrastructure spanned multiple systems, including SharePoint and IMIS for constituent management. Clunky or non-existent integrations meant lots of manual processes and a disconnect between departments across the organization.
A new stack built on Acquia Cloud promised enterprise scalability, along with Acquia DAM to replace SharePoint and IMIS for file storage. Acquia Lift and Content Hub brought website personalization to the mix to bolster the user experience. Finally, Personify replaced Sharepoint and IMIS as the primary user data source to tie everything together.
The resulting challenge was two-fold: first, how to integrate the new Drupal-based platform, and then, how to migrate all of the data and content properly.
Information Architecture
Integrating a content taxonomy into a Drupal migration, to connect content and make browsing better
Integrating a content taxonomy into a Drupal migration, to connect content and make browsing better
In order to migrate content and files properly, the entire content model was re-architected to support more sophisticated relationships.
Hundreds of taxonomy terms to identify projects and documents were narrowed to core “topics,” creating a better browsing experience and making it easier to search.
Content from SharePoint and IMIS was then programmatically migrated, tagged, and moved into Acquia DAM, which shares files to any system from a single point. Project data, migrated by the client team into Personify, is pulled into Drupal on an ongoing basis to connect people and project information.
Personalization w/ Acquia Lift
Personalized for all users—driving continued engagement
Personalized for all users—driving continued engagement
Replatforming content was good, but that wasn’t enough to improve the experience for subscribers. One of the primary project goals was to increase subscriber engagement, or in other words, get more research into the hands of people who could use it.
Features like the ability to follow content, frequent project updates, and subscriptions to “topic hubs” keep subscribers informed of new research without necessitating additional site visits to check out what was new. And when users do visit the site, personalization with Acquia Lift helps users get the most out of each visit.
After we implemented Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track key activities, Data Studio dashboards made success easy to measure.
Within the first two weeks of the launch of the Drupal 8 site, returning user visits to the site rose 150%, with nearly 50 new accounts registered and more than 600 content downloads across various research projects. Overall, we saw a 10% increase in overall content views of projects, research and case studies. The engagement lift shows that personalized user experience, along with seamless technical integration, is helping Water Research Foundation continue its mission.
Not ready? See how we approach improvement engagement.