Organizational Overview
Planet Forward is a multimedia project that brings expert, student and citizen stakeholders together to identify, elevate and reward innovative ideas in the sustainability arena. This is done through a website that blends editorial content with user-generated content, a series of innovation salons and summits and a weekly television presence on Bloomberg TV.
Project Description
Planet Forward is seeking a redesign of its primary media outlet, www.planetforward.org in the form of a new, well-developed CMS implementation that showcases and supports our blended editorial and user content model.
Planet Forward’s basic user proposition is that we are a project that engages you on sustainability issues in three ways: we tell you what we know (through editorial content), show you what the experts say (through solicited content) and then ask what you think or how you can help (through user generated content). In essence, the sequence is “This is how we think we can solve the problem, this is how the experts can solve the problem, how can you solve the problem?”
We wish to promote user engagement through submission to the UGC section of the site, comments on editorial content and UGC and quarterly contests. Engagement so far has been primarily successful through social media, so all on-site feedback mechanisms should be closely tied to social media efforts, especially Facebook and Twitter.
The current site is a Wordpress 3.5 implementation with over 3,000 posts. The user system is based on a heavily-modified version of BuddyPress 1.2. The staff is favorable to continuing with Wordpress, and an updated, non-modified BuddyPress is an option for user functionality, but another CMS/user system combination is an option if it can be proved to better serve the purposes of the site.
We worked with Planet Forward to match a large requirements list with an appropriate backend system, design, and direction. Ultimately, we converted the existing Wordpress information to Drupal and built out an entirely new design with mobile as an important part of the strategy. The project would relaunch with thousands of users and content entries along with millions of monthly visits.