NL Platform: Solving global challenges together

Project assignment

Team NL Branding is responsible for the international positioning of the Netherlands as a partner for co-creating solutions for global social challenges ("Solving global challenges together"). The invitation to work together is at the center of all messages that we send on behalf of the Netherlands, including activities, print publications, and online presence.

The Netherlands as a whole ("we, the Netherlands...") presents itself on the website NLPlatform.com. It has the ambition to be the overall landing page that inspires the foreign countries with a range of articles and propositions in the full breadth of the NL positioning; trade, R&D, education, tourism, top sectors, and more.

From this content, visitors can access the players and their backgrounds to engage in collaboration. There are many sites of organizations (NFIA, NBTC, top sectors, etc.) that represent the Netherlands abroad, but they have their own website set up specifically for what they do, often in combination with social media. Additionally, there are websites of public-private collaborations that are presented on behalf of the Netherlands as a whole (at least a sector), which are fully inclusive in terms of the parties that can be attached to it (PIBs: partners in international business). These PIBs and other public-private collaborations such as PSDs (private sector development), SMMs (strategic multi-year market management).

The project task is made up of two components:

• Creating a campaign template;

• Creating 6 campaign sites based on the first template.

Outcome

The question at hand requires unique websites, campaign sites, that serve as a content hub with its own target audience and theme. At the same time, we are looking for scalability and manageability as the number of sites grows. Copying websites quickly is an option, but a collection of copied environments is not a cohesive whole, they are separate sites. A generic adjustment, such as implementing security updates, will have to be done one by one, per website. The addition of generic requests, such as a particular field or component on the homepage, will also have to be done site by site. This is the reason why Finalist advised to pursue a multi-site setup. This way, you can be generic where it can and unique where it needs to be. The shared underlying structure, delivered by the content management framework Drupal, is generic. The framework for the campaign sites, the basic setup, UX, types of content, and components that will return in each campaign site are also generic. The content, users, target audience, and look & feel of each campaign site are unique.

In a multi-site architecture that we propose, one Drupal codebase serves multiple sites. It is effective and secure because interim updates to the code are applied at once for all sites. At the same time, the websites themselves are autonomous. They have their own database where things like configuration, content, and users are stored.

Key Features:

• Centralized application management is possible;
• Contribution to communication goals through increased consistency in style across all sites without sacrificing autonomy; 
• Good ability to monitor, control, and adjust content on individual sites;
• The platform is highly scalable;
• Single development of functionality for repeated use in sites;
• Maintains freedom and flexibility for individual sites in terms of content and appearance;
• Each site meets a set of minimum technical requirements: responsiveness, performance, security, etc.;
• Fast delivery of a new site.