Background
Stay Housed LA, a partnership of Legal Service Providers (LSPs) and Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), has been a beacon of hope for tenants facing eviction in Los Angeles County. Funded by the City and County of Los Angeles, Stay Housed LA offers critical services such as legal information, representation, and community education.
Challenge:
The previous Stay Housed LA website had limitations in user experience and accessibility, which created barriers for the tenants who needed their help. The website did not provide easy access to legal rights information, workshops, and legal service applications, particularly for those with limited English proficiency, disabilities, or low bandwidth internet connections. The backend infrastructure lacked the required sophistication to manage applications, organize events, and maintain an updated legal information database.
Solution:
After conducting extensive user research with tenants, staff, and online respondents, Urban Insight redesigned Stay Housed LA's website with a mobile-first design and enhanced UX to cater to its diverse audience. The team focused on building a robust, database-powered website with user-friendly and accessible interfaces. The site now features multi-language support and clear navigation to legal resources, event registrations, and legal service applications.
The new platform also automates application assignment to the appropriate organization based on geographical and other criteria, provides the ability to manage and monitor grant profiles, and presents an integrated event management system. The system sends automated confirmations and reminders via email and text messages to enhance communication. In addition, it ensures data security with advanced encryption.
The result is an inclusive, intuitive, and comprehensive digital platform, propelling Stay Housed LA's mission to protect tenants and strengthen communities.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen due to the very strong admin role capabilities, its extensibility to add complex features that required signficant API integrations, multilingual capabilities and security. The technical architecture is headless Drupal with Drupal as the backend CMS and React framework, Next.js, on the front-end.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
These are just a few of the many modules that were used to more development more efficient. Many were selected due to the headless architecture, the need to send SMS text messages, the security requirements for users and the backend capabilities related to importing and exporting CSVs of critical data.
