Helping the U.N. Create a Flawless Digital Experience

United Nations Development Program

Helping the U.N. Create a Flawless Digital Experience

Challenge

Since 1966, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) – one of the world’s biggest aid agencies – has worked to eliminate poverty and inequality by helping countries achieve sustainable economic growth. But UNDP’s digital platforms, which were not up to the task of communicating and enabling this powerful mission, offered subpar experiences for both content creators and website visitors. To better serve its global stakeholders, UNDP urgently needed to replace more than 170 existing corporate websites with multi-lingual, responsive and scalable platforms. It also needed to implement a user-friendly content management system (CMS). When UNDP reached out to Srijan, a Material company, to help it accomplish these two goals, we leveraged our experience implementing dynamic, user-friendly platforms for biopharma companies, telecom giants and luxury brands. We also launched a three-pronged strategy to help UNDP streamline its digital experience..

Approach

Created a strategic roadmap that enabled UNDP to migrate 170+ sites and 30K+ multilingual pages to scalable platforms.
Build an integrated platform on a single-code base architecture in the Acquia environment, with Drupal CMS as the base.
Redesigned sites for responsiveness and scalability and implemented a simple, no-code, drag-and-drop CMS to enable editors to make quick, hassel-free updates.

Outcomes

UNDP’s content creators no longer need IT on speed dial: low-code tools and simplified processes allow editors to publish in real-time and share content easily. Meanwhile, after UNDP’s corporate websites were migrated to the Acquia Cloud Platform, IT teams are now able to work efficiently from a centralized hosting solution managed from a single interface, creating the much-needed visibility, trust and control for efficiently operating global websites as a service.

We also created a common design language across all country sites, enabling a platform-centric approach that allows the team to easily onboard a new country or region with similar structure and ample flexibility. UNDP now has a reusable components library with 80+ customizable components from which content creators and editors can quickly create web pages.

The results have been impressive, including 200x more search results and decreased response times to queries. UNDP now offers consistent experiences across its global websites, can more effectively share its message with a diverse, global audience, and can easily scale in the future with flexible digital platforms.

We were thrilled to be named “Leader of the Pack” in the NGO/Non-Profit category of the 2022 Acquia Engage Awards, which recognizes outstanding digital experiences. But most of all, we’re excited our work is helping this essential organization carry out its vital mission of empowering countries around the world.

United Nations Development Program