Social Venture Partners

Promoting a centralized solution for social philanthropists across the globe.

The Challenge

Social Venture Partners (SVP) is a global network of local partners aligning passion and purpose. They intrinsically know that true success comes by inspiring members towards potential they couldn’t have accomplished on their own. With this in mind, I worked closely with an amazing designer to develop a website ecosystem that would allow SVP to not only create a compelling look-and-feel utilizing its newly redesigned brand, but also offer the same easily-customizable template to any of the dozens of member organizations spanning the globe.

On the backend, we utilized a WordPress Multisite installation. I was able to utilize global site templating with simple content management, calendaring, event management, blogging, and widget configuration. This was the key to bring one disparate affiliate organizations under one primary web presence.

Along with their new unified web presence, I assisted in presenting a strategic roadmap to prepare SVP for the next 5-10 years of progress. I took an in-depth look at the technology they were using, interviewed members, analyzed what their biggest technological needs were for the future, and presented a simple document detailing their next steps.

Learnings

  • I learned how to utilize WordPress Multisite to provide a consistent experience for affiliate members from a standard site "template" or configuration by modifying an open-source plugin.
  • Creating a theme to mimic the designed site information architecture was challenging. As a developer, I tended toward building out custom functionality instead of utilizing plugins, which proved to be both useful in some situations and not ideal in others. While the end product works, my hunch is that I could have accelerated the development timeline had I been familiar with the WordPress plugin landscape.
  • After completing the website, I went on further to provide consulting services for their next intranet platform (moving away from Microsoft Sharepoint to Atlassian's Confluence) as well as development services for synchronization between their intranet user database and their Salesforce instance using a custom PHP script.

Source code is not currently available.

Technologies

  • HTML5
  • CSS3
  • PHP 5.4
  • MySQL 5.5
  • WordPress Multisite
  • Javascript (ES5)
  • jQuery
  • Adaptive Design
  • Twitter Bootstrap

  • We used Git internally of course for development, but found it to be challenging to keep track of assets for a main site template and have it integrate nicely with dozens of subsites.
  • Apache 2

  • The main site lived on a single EC2 instance. All subsite media assets were housed in an S3 bucket.

  • We used Jenkins for deployments.

Duration

About 6 months
(2013)

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