Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Site development and project management by @amandahart, theming by @jnetlarsen, and consulting by @stephenpashby.
The CEO Roundtable on Cancer was created in 2001 at the request of former President George H.W. Bush to bring together the United States’ key cancer leaders from government, business, academia, and non-profit in order to work on eliminating cancer.
Today, the CEO Roundtable on Cancer is a nonprofit organization consisting of chief executives across a wide range of sectors, all working together to help eliminate cancer as a personal disease and public health problem. These executives contribute to the fight against cancer on several fronts including developing and implementing corporate initiatives that reduce the risk of cancer, enable early diagnosis, facilitate access to the best available treatments, and hasten the discovery of new and more effective anti-cancer therapies.
The CEO Roundtable on Cancer operates three Drupal 7 websites: the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, the CEO Cancer Gold Standard, and the Life Sciences Consortium; all three developed by different agencies with different approaches on how to enter and display content. As a byproduct of their origins, each website displayed and managed data differently, while coded to arbitrarily different standards and styles; yielding less than optimal experiences for both content administrators and developers.
CEO Roundtable turned to DesignHammer to centralize support, maintenance, and feature development of the websites. As part of a project to standardize the three websites, DesignHammer worked to improve the workflows for the Cancer Gold Standard website to facilitate accreditation completion and overall usability.
The Gold Standard website accreditation program provides a framework for employers to create a healthier workplace by focusing on cancer risk reduction, early detection, access to clinical trials and high-quality care. The initiative is designed to motivate employers to establish programs that reduce cancer risk and it requires applicants to meet five separate qualifications or “pillars” before they can be accredited as a Gold Standard employer. Once Gold Standard accreditation is achieved, additional steps can be taken to earn the Global Gold Standard, a level of accreditation for employers with international operations.
CEO Roundtable’s changes in business goals and marketing initiatives over time had left their websites in various states that were not advancing the organization’s mission. None of the sites had been developed with mobile in mind. This left executives, the site's primary users, at a disadvantage when attempting to share website with other executives, typically done on mobile devices at airports, or otherwise on the go.
Most importantly, the accreditation program on the previous Cancer Gold Standard website required interested companies to submit one standard application via a complex system, one that relied entirely on custom code and did not utilize Webform. There was no way for existing members to apply for Global Gold Standard accreditation, or to apply for re-accreditation; a limitation that needed to be addressed in the redesign.
About the project
Project Goals
For the Cancer Gold Standard website, the accreditation application covers the five pillars of the Gold Standard and include hundreds of questions. As contributions from a variety of internal stakeholders are required to successfully complete an application, a custom workflow for multiple users was needed. An optimized accreditation workflow was sought to serve the needs of users starting accreditation applications, contributing to specific sections of applications, or finalizing and submitting the applications across multiple accreditation types.
Requirements
Complicated Complex custom code had to be rewritten to enact comply with Drupal coding standards, and to clarify functionality. The new site also required a modern theme that was mobile-ready.
A Toolkit system needed to be added to the Gold Standard website in order to group content from across the site by category, and existing content needed to be tagged appropriately to appear on the correct Toolkit pages with no additional effort from CEO Roundtable’s staff. See Gold Standard site’s University Toolkit. for an example
The Gold Standard website’s multi-step application process needed to be streamlined so that once logged-in, different members could only view protected content relevant to their membership status. Non-Members and/or other interested parties would be able to view a PDF version of the standard application on the website, but unable to view the new application system (to be built using Webform) until they registered for a new account.
Navigating the site needed to be intuitive to users, requiring new call-to-actions on the homepage to signal a change in application procedure and point users towards the page appropriate to their member type.
Outcome
The new websites were a great success, with CEO Roundtable seeing a 50% increase in successful re-accreditation submissions for 2018 over 2017. The new mobile layout has made it much easier for CEO Roundtable staff and member organization CEOs to show off the Gold Standard website while on the go,. Interaction among these executives typically happens often in airport lounges and during other brief travel moments. For this reason, their newfound ability to quickly show off interesting content on the Gold Standard website has been a game-changer.
DesignHammer simplified the content editing process for CEO Roundtable staff members by leveraging Views and Content Types to dynamically generate pages that previously required manual editing. This targeted automation of content display reduces the burden of content updates for the small full-time staff of CEO Roundtable.
The improved workflows and targeted automation included in the redesign helped the CEO Roundtable staff focus strategically on how better to leverage the website to support CEO Roundtable’s mission rather than requiring them to focus on assisting applicants with accreditation or spending significant time manually editing website content.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal had already proved an effective platform for the CEO Roundtable websites and CEO Roundtable staff was familiar with the content creation and editing workflows. At the time of the project, Drupal 7 provided the most mature ecosystem of Contributed modules for the required functionality of the project including Webform and Views & Context.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Based upon the needs and requirements of the project, no distribution offered an adequate return on investment to be chosen over Drupal 7 core. Drupal 8 was not sufficiently mature when the project was started to be a viable option.
Webform is the most important contrib module used on the site. The Gold Standard website relies on Webform for all of its applications. Each application is built out as a detailed webform, with the most complex comprising of approximately 190 components. Custom code then utilizes the webforms to display the application to users and to generate a printable version. The ability to synch up the user’s application status with other features on the site was another reason to use Webform for this project.
Views and Context were used extensively for generating reports for admins related to applications, as well as for the Pillar and Toolkit sections on the sites. View blocks are placed with Context on specific paths in order to create a fully dynamic experience for these Pillar and Toolkit features. CEO Roundtable admins do not need to manually edit content in order for new information to appear on these features.
