The Global Peace Festival Foundation (GPFF) is an international non-profit organization dedicated to "promoting the vision of One Family Under God through building interfaith partnerships, vibrant families, and a culture of service and peace." Much of their work lies in connecting like-minded individuals and organizations to work together on specific service and educational programs.

Having built up a large base of individual and organizational contacts in countries around the world over the course of many years, GPFF came to us with an idea to build a social platform which would allow those contacts to reach out directly to each other. GPFF contacts would use the platform to build their own networks, deepen relationships and community around the organization's ideals, and ultimately be more fully equipped to work together in building their own programs with complimentary goals.

This project began as a simple idea. GPFF recognized the need and had a general concept, but was looking for an experienced firm to carry it out.

Working closely with GPFF's client project lead, NS Web Solutions staff began by creating an over-arching specification that detailed the goals of the platform. Great emphasis was placed on providing quick and lasting value to platform users, encouraging them to become registered members of the online community, and rewarding those members that through their own contributions added value to the community. Also, because of GPFF's relationship with so many existing non-profit organizations, they wanted the community to be built primarily around the organizations, rather than individual users.

Considering this project's heavily user-centered nature, in which most of the content would be user-generated, we recommended building this site in Drupal, one of NS Web Solutions' core technology offerings. Drupal provides a large base of existing modules for user management and interaction, and its excellent security and permissioning systems were ideal for this user-driven environment.

The design for the site was created by GPFF's in-house graphic design team, based on layout and wireframes developed by the NS Web Solutions team. We sent them the wireframes and sketches for page layout, and they sent us a complete design in Photoshop, which we in turn sliced up into a full Drupal theme.

Most of the site features were added using existing Drupal modules, which gave GPFF a huge savings in custom development, since we had no need to charge for creating them. The excellent Organic Groups module handles the core functionality, providing connections for all member organizations and their users, and providing any user with capacity to create their own ad-hoc groups for discussion of any topic or project. Other existing modules were used to integrate Twitter and Facebook feeds, provide on-site "status update" functionality, user ratings of content, organizational blogs, video and photo galleries, and much more.

GPFF chose to host this platform on their own servers. We were happy to upload and test it for them, and then continue to provide ongoing support for both the site and its servers through our Webmaster and Site Management package.

Development platform: Drupal

Design: Hybrid (Wireframes and final theme by NS Web Solutions; Photoshop mockups by client)

Hosting: Client

Additional services: Webmaster and Site Management