Background
Girlguiding UK enables girls and young women to develop their potential and to make a difference to the world. The aim of guiding is to help girls and young women develop emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually so that they can make a positive contribution to their community and the wider world.
Girlguiding UK and World Guiding Girlguiding UK makes guiding available in the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies, its overseas territories and in British communities overseas, to every girl and woman who wants to take part.
There are Girl Guide Associations in all 53 countries in the Commonwealth. Most are independent and a small number are Branch Associations of Girlguiding UK.
Girlguiding UK is a founder member of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), which currently has ten million members in 145 countries. All WAGGGS member organisations share a number of common principles:
- Commitment to the ideals embodied in a Promise and Law
- Membership that is open to all girls and women irrespective of faith, race, culture, nationality or any other circumstance, provided they are able to understand and are willing to make or work towards making the Promise
- Membership which is voluntary
- Independence from any political organisation
- Membership which is self‐governing, with freedom to formulate its policy and put it into practice.
Problem
Girlguiding UK had selected the Immediacy (now Alterian CMC) content management system and purchased this through a partner, but the project faltered. Although there was a clear requirement to migrate a number of sites onto a commercial CMS, the project was not being progressed at a reasonable pace.
When a need arose to deploy a site to support the Centenary celebrations for the Girlguiding UK movement in late 2009, it became clear that an agile, experienced partner was needed to ensure that the site went live on time.
Solution
Unified Solutions deployed an agile approach to defining, scoping and deploying the first site based on the Alterian CMC solution. We worked closely with the internal graphics design team to draw up and agree a design which would fit within the overall brand but also be a distinct platform for the Centenary.
With little experience of the architecture of Alterian CMC, we assisted the internal IT team with understanding the best way to install and deploy the software on their environment.
Girlguiding UK is the United Kingdom's largest voluntary organisation for girls and young women, with around half a million members including about 100,000 trained volunteer adult Leaders and supporters. 'Girlguiding UK' is an operating name of The Guide Association.
Location: London
http://www.girlguiding.org.uk
What We Did
The Centenary site was launched in late 2009, on time and in budget - it supported the entire year of celebrations, camps, events that thousands enjoyed throughout 2010. In particular, the event calendar was a great hit with site visitors, allowing them to easily identify which celebrations would be most suitable based on a wide range of selection criteria.
Since the first site launch, Unified has worked closely with Girlguiding UK to make the most of their investment in the Alterian CMC platform; launches closely following on from the Centenary site included an online Guiding Manual, a Web 2.0 micro-site where current and previous members of Girlguiding UK could submit text, video and pictures to an online Story Bank - building up a fantastic visual and descriptive history of the movement, written by the members themselves.
The main site was also migrated to the Alterian CMC platform during a re-design which also involved integration with the main back office systems and work continues on streamlining the login process and deploying a more powerful, cross-site search solution