Portfolio

The BC New Democratic Party approached us in the summer of 2008 with an eye to rolling out an online communication strategy that included a new website for the party, websites for party leader Carole James and all 85 candidates running in the 2009 provincial election, and a template-based system that would allow the party’s communications team to build and launch campaign sites on the fly, without ever having to code HTML.

The party website was the first priority; technical limitations were hogging staff resources that could be better allocated to content development and other communications work, and their existing content management system did not allow for easy integration with social media tools. The primary communications goal of the new site was to increase the spectrum of engagement that visitors could have with the party, from low-level (sign a petition, for example) to higher-level (such as becoming a donor, a member, or an online advocate).

We redesigned and rebuilt the site from the ground up, refreshing the content structure and visual design, and completely overhauling the technical infrastructure, building out a robust Drupal framework designed to handle a spectrum of use-case scenarios, from hectic pre-election campaigning to quieter, capacity-building times between elections.

Next, we tackled the email newsletter system, designing a series of email templates and moving the e-newsletter into a system that allows communications staff to build and send email campaigns in-house, while retaining a consistent look and feel across all outgoing communications.

The CaroleJames.ca site came next: a mini site built around a series of videos that provide insights into James’s character and her vision for British Columbia. We followed that launch with the development of a custom system, based once again on Drupal, that allows staff at the NDP office to create websites on an as-needed for their candidates running in constituencies around the province.

From our perspective, the most exciting thing about this series of projects is the level of capacity we helped to build at head office; the staff there are now equipped to manage an extensive online communications system that even includes the ability to create new sites with the click of a button – and we mean that quite literally. That frees everyone up to spend less time coding HTML and more time attending to big-picture concerns, like how to get those candidates elected.

1. 

   The new party website offers visitors a range of ways to take action online.

2. 

   Flexible and scalable, the site was designed to function well in both pre-election campaign mode and in the "off-season".

3. 

   We developed a custom-built, template-driven system that allows new candidate sites to be created with the click of a mouse.