Volunteer donation and promotion platform
About VSO
London-based Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) was established in 1958 and as of 2021, 80,000 people have volunteered to help to fight poverty across the world’s least developed areas including Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
In 2020, VSO volunteers and partners reached over 4.5 million people.
They bring about lasting change not by sending aid, but by working through volunteers and partners to empower communities in some of the world’s poorest regions.
VSO selected Ixis to deliver a one year contract to revitalise its website presence. VSO wanted to simplify their multisite setup by consolidating subdomains and migrating away from a proprietary CMS to Drupal.
The Results
By moving away from a closed-source CMS and utilising Drupal, the not-for-profit organisation avoids paying recurring license fees and benefits from increased functionality from a large code contributing community. Their closed-source CMS cost over £250,000 in licensing fees alone.
This was also the perfect opportunity for them to consolidate some of their surplus websites and subdomains to minimise the management and support of multiple websites.
Moving from one CMS platform to another can feel overwhelming for a client’s web team and comes with many challenges.
Our service desk team assisted and answered any Drupal and website-related queries from the VSO editorial team to help get them running with their new CMS.
"Ixis were well ahead of the game with their Drupal experience and previous technical ability migrating websites across to the Drupal framework."
The Brief
VSO previously used a closed source content management system but wanted to move to open source to avoid recurring license fees and benefit from increased functionality from a large code contributing community.
As a multinational charity, they had challenges around the amount of domains, subdomains and technologies they were using which became complex to manage.
VSO were unable to maximise the code being used on some of their domains in order to replicate this for other languages.
Voluntary Services Overseas wanted a Drupal website developing to improve on the core functionality their current CMS installation was providing.
They also required resilient, stable and high-uptime hosting and training for their technical and editorial teams.
Using the Drupal multisite capability, we migrated their current site while consolidating their 27 domains down to 9 in tandem.
If you're looking for support in managing multiple domains or technologies so you can focus on growth, contact our team now.
