International Rivers Using Drupal to Protect People, Water, Life

International Rivers is the foremost global river protection organization working in Africa, China, the Amazon, Southeast Asia and other regions to protect rivers and stop destructive dam projects.

We use Drupal to coordinate our network of campaigners who's activism includes publishing reports, videos, press releases and blogs to internationalrivers.org in English, Spanish, Chinese and other languages.

Testimonial

Drupal was the best thing that ever happened to my online workflow. It freed me from the Web Master and got rid of a major bottleneck. Now, I don't have to wait a whole week to post an urgent action or update web content.

Why we needed Drupal

As a nonprofit organization, our message is our integrity. Everything we publish about our area of expertise -- rivers and dams -- has to be accurate, timely and engaging. Before Drupal, we weren't able to directly publish to the web. Everything had to go through and Web Master, a process which reflected the "old way" a legacy from print publication that carried on needlessly. After migrating to Drupal our campaigners could communicate directly with their constituencies, disseminating information without a gatekeeper while leveraging the ability of the CMS to do the work of "framing our message." Aside from copyediting and small formatting glitches (not the territory of a CMS anyhow), Drupal allows International Rivers to publish the most up-to-date and relevant exposés on transnational corporations, government bureaucracies and supports the activists and campaigners who mobilize against them.

Before migrating to Drupal campaigners had to submit articles for review, which created a choke point in work flow. Using roles (such a simple thing!) allowed our team to better coordinate without having to get prior approval, all editing is retroactive. The publish content module allows campaigners to work on a page unpublished, but without relying on the all powerful "administer nodes" permission. Publishing photos, blogs and video is now a point and click operation, instead of coordinating multiple departments across continents.

Building the site

We built the site with the help of Five Paths and Design Action Collective. We started off doing a needs assessment with our users and our staff. One of the biggest issues people had with the old site was not being able to publish instantly. The "reveal" of being able to use a CMS, hit "submit" and have your work go live was very important.

Key features of internationalrivers.org

• Customized homepage using views, Nice Menu and Google CSE
• GMap location to show regions where rivers are threatened
• Roles to allow campaigners to publish multiple content types
• Use of i18n for multilingual content

Key modules

• CCK - Allows us flexibility in creating new content types for dissemination to local partner organizations.
• GMap - So we can show users where the dam projects and threatened rivers are.
• Google CSE - Best way to find information about us.
• Internationalization - It is a global world, not everyone speaks English.
• Nice Menus - Part of our customized homepage.
• Pathauto - Helps make page results and search engine optimization relevant.
• Publish content - Part of our system to allow timely publishing while preventing chaos.
• TinyMCE - Allows campaigners with all levels of technological skills to write in a user friendly environment.

Integration

Our donation page integrates with Democracy in Action seamlessly to process donations and email lists.