Cultivating tangible change
United Nations Millennium Campaign
Situation: The UN Millennium Campaign’s annual Stand Up Against Poverty event is a Guinness World Record-setting public action campaign that brings together people around the world to organize community advocacy events on the same day. The UN Millennium Campaign wanted organizers to come to a website within the 24-hour period to enter data about the number of participants at their event, and to do so they needed to access the site in several languages. The UN Millennium Campaign wanted two big wins from its website: to get people talking about the Millennium Development goals and to make a big splash in the media by breaking their own world record. We designed the online strategy and deployed a multilingual website to help them achieve this.
Solution: For the 2007 event we built a website with a public interface that was translated into four languages other than English. While Drupal already had a great toolset for developers to make translations, the UN Millennium Campaign needed to save time and money by letting their staff do the translation work, and their staff lacked the technical training to use the existing tools. To facilitate this process, we built an on-screen translation tool that allowed their staff to view any page on the site, identify untranslated phrases, and translate them to a new language without technical training.
The next hurdle with the project had to do with data collection. Since the UN Millennium Campaign was already relying on the Democracy In Action CRM product for managing their information, they wanted to collect data in that rather than Drupal. However, the Democracy In Action toolset did not allow for translating submission forms. With a powerful translation toolset in place on the Drupal side, we were able to set up a form in Drupal that talked to Democracy In Action using its API, and the UN Millennium Campaign staff were easily able to translate the Drupal pages. This let them effectively use a powerful CRM product that offered no multilingual support for a multilingual project, and helped them break their own prior world record by logging over 40 million participants in the one-day event. We recently redesigned the website in several languages for 2008’s event.
design, strategy, built multiple websites, developed custom video player
Work
design, strategy, built multiple websites, developed custom video player
Strategy Focus
Displaying Photos Easily and Compellingly with Flickr Widgets
Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org
Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org
At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).
With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming.
Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken. This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach.
That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site. Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign: