Taking on the challenges of climate change head on is oftentimes framed to be in direct contrast with providing jobs and promoting a healthy economy. A new partnership of economic and climate research organizations sees things differently. In fact, they believe that the change needed to curb climate change can help strengthen economies. They call it the New Climate Economy. This partnership, formally known as the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate (GCEC), wanted to make a splash right before the commencement of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The plan was to launch their website the same day. They wanted a site that was simple and communicated their vision clearly.
We immediately saw this as the perfect opportunity to employ OpenAid. OpenAid is a turnkey website platform designed to help NGOs and other organizations create cost-effective program-focused websites quickly. We built OpenAid as a part of our work with USAID, Johns Hopkins University, its K4Health program, and we continue to provide support.
OpenAid’s strength is in the way it showcases the work of an organization. Out of the box it provides a carousel, hero statement, gallery and blogroll. Its clean and responsive design ensures that the content will present beautifully across devices.
Building off the existing strengths of the distribution, it didn’t take much for us to customize OpenAid to do exactly what GCEC needed it to. After quick and focused design and information architecture phases, site implementation only involved a few CSS changes and two new content types. In just a couple weeks GCEC had their site up and ready with plenty of time to prepare before the big launch.
We developed OpenAid to help organizations promote their ideas and share their successes. GCEC was looking for a way to do just that. Their press conference generated a lot of buzz and the site saw immediate traffic. The site launch was undoubtedly a success and I’m excited for the next opportunity to use OpenAid to do the same for others as well. I invite other organizations and developers to make use of this distribution as well. Learn more at openaiddistro.org or join the growing OpenAid community at groups.drupal.org/openaid