The players in this case study are:

The Wallace Foundation is a philanthropic organization that provides grants to nonprofits in areas of the arts, school leadership and youth development. Their charter is to support the efforts of grant recipients and share the knowledge gained from their endeavors. To do this, Wallace relies heavily on their website. They make a wide range of information such as videos, podcasts, documents and infographics downloadable online.

Wallace’s previous site CMS, Microsoft SharePoint, was failing them on many fronts. It was difficult to update and manage and did not provide adequate search capabilities. “Previously, our assets were scattered across different platforms with very little organization” recalls Omar Salem, Web Technology Specialist at The Wallace Foundation. 

As the nature of their work evolved,there were other challenges and limitations to the SharePoint system that could not be fixed without costly development work. This led Wallace to abandon SharePoint and engage a partnership of vendors to reimagine the front and back end of their site from all angles – design, content management, site maintenance and performance.

Rather than focus on the tech solutions first up, the team thought through the problems they needed to solve. Josh Koenig Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Pantheon Platform advocates strongly for this approach, saying “Before you get into technology, really think about the outcomes you’re going for.” 

Beth Yezzi, VP, Account Management at Yes& identified one of the biggest problems Wallace had was how to display their assets, “They had a ton of great assets but they could not display them on their website.” While Yes& recommended Drupal as the new web CMS, it too had its shortcomings. This drove the decision to partner with IntelligenceBank. 

As Beth explains it, “Drupal falls very short in terms of storing and organizing assets. Their folder structure is a headache. Once you put something into Drupal, it’s really hard to find again. They don’t let you tag, and we know Wallace had a ton of assets they were going to manage.” This is not a surprise as this is not what Drupal is designed to do. IntelligenceBank, on the other hand, is designed to do just that, and it integrates hand in glove with Drupal. As content is created on the Drupal site, assets are served up directly from the IntelligenceBank platform.

Pantheon’s WebOps platform was also key to helping Wallace get the most out of their new tech stack by providing developers and content editors with a more modern workflow. Josh, is a big believer in co-ordinated composability “You’re weaving together multiple technologies to ultimately deliver the right experience to your visitors and give the right tools to your team.”

IntelligenceBank is now Wallace’s central repository for assets such as photos, PDF reports, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint and Word documents – all of which integrates with Drupal. “One thing we love about the IntelligenceBank Drupal connector is the ability to select a preset without having to download the image, open in Photoshop, resize the image, then reupload the asset. This connector streamlines the process and makes it quicker and easier to embed our full resolution, high-quality, large sized images in a format that is under 1MB thanks to the use of the presets” said Omar.

When asked what he likes most about the new system, Omar smiles “My favorite part is that our editorial team has become self-sufficient. They don’t have to come to me unless there’s a website glitch or a missing critical feature. They can go in and create or edit content on their own so that I can go back to my primary duties.”

This winning vendor partnership is set to continue with Josh explaining “Where we really add extra value is in use cases where people are trying to compose something with multiple players. If we can give people a well lit path and help them do more – everybody wins.” And when those solutions ‘play nice together’ it’s pure partnership poetry.

By leveraging each partner’s expertise, The Wallace Foundation now has a beautifully designed, fast and easily administered site that instantly loads high quality videos, podcasts and graphics. 

You can listen to a deep dive on this solution and partnership in our webinar