Our Work
Delivering your vision
Mencap
Website development and simpler donations
Services
Mencap.org.uk plays a crucial role in providing information and support to people with learning disabilities and their families across the UK. The challenge: their legacy CMS, an ASP based platform, had become outdated and a bottleneck within the web team's workflow. We replaced it with Drupal for the lack of license fees, flexibility and widespread use in the charity sector. This resulted in freeing up the tech team and allowing more departments to manage their sections of the website themselves.
The Challenge
Mencap, the 15th largest charity in the UK, support people with learning disabilities and their carers. Through fundraising, education, support and campaigning they help raise the profile and needs of these individuals. Mencap tendered for a supplier to carry out the redevelopment of their new website. Their old CMS was costly, difficult to use and didn't allow them to respond to modern advances in the digital world.
The Solution
As well as the development of the website, there were two other important tasks that needed to run concurrently: content migration and providing the functionality for transactions (e.g. donations and tickets).
The complexity of the website structure and accessibility requirements required close co-operation with Mencap to ensure that the new site met the needs of their users. An Apache Solr powered search provides an efficient "drill-down" search, allowing users to easily find the content they are looking for.
Mencap also needed the flexibility to be able to quickly create new donation campaigns. To fulfil this, a transaction layer was built on top of the webform module. We then created a custom module that takes the user to a payment page on submission of the form.
The legacy site had built up around 4000 pieces of structured content. We worked closely with Mencap's technical team to ensure that this was accurately migrated across to the Drupal site. Mencap's technical team worked to migrate the data out of the MSSQL database and into an agreed schema in a MySQL database.
URL: http://www.mencap.org.uk
Mencap
Gemma Pedder, Senior Digital Manager
"Cameron & Wilding relaunched our website last year moving it from an out of date and bespoke CMS to a Drupal platform. This has given us a much more flexible system that works with our needs and will develop with us over time. It has given us much more scope to carry out tasks that we would have had to rely on a developer for in the past."
The Key Benefits
We delivered a fully featured Drupal site, complex data migration and a powerful donation platform, which greatly reduced costs and time taken to manage the website. This new website has empowered Mencap's web team to work more effectively by quickly creating new donation campaigns and easily managing content. Mencap's users benefit from a user-friendly design, powerful search and consistent browsing experience. One simple example of the benefits are the donation forms that once took a full day to create by the web team and can now be created in 20 minutes by one of the editorial teams.
