Free Press is a nonprofit that works to change the media to transform democracy to realize a just society.
We led a rebuild and redesign of the FreePress.net website to modernize its codebase, expand its storytelling features, and refresh its design system.
While it was running on Drupal 10, much of its underlying architecture was built in non-standard ways. This made it onerous and costly to maintain. We rebuilt the site using Drupal best practices and migrated its content into the new, cleanly-architected site. To increase petition and donation conversions, DevCollab integrated the site with ActionKit, and Theory One designed a modern, refreshed theme.
Clean, Modern Codebase Following Drupal Best Practices
Free Press came to DevCollab several years ago with a website that seemed fine at first glance. Looking under the hood, however, we found it was built with bespoke PHP code that took it off the Open Source Superhighway and made even simple tasks like Block placement and Views creation difficult and time-consuming.
We revamped their technical architecture and codebase to meet the needs of end users and staff editors. Building in line with Drupal standards, staying much closer to core, we also made the site easier for developers to maintain efficiently and affordably into the future.
Flexible Yet Intuitive Editor Experience
The old Free Press site included many storytelling elements for editors, but they were opinionated and inflexible as to when, where, and how they could be used. This made site editing tedious for staff content editors.
We expanded the components available to editors and built them using CKEditor, CKEditor Accordion, Charts, Entity Embed, Footnotes, and Paragraphs, so that Free Press’ communications team can seamlessly build out webpages as they see fit.
To further ease work for staff content editors, we built the editing experience to match their established workflow. The Free Press team drafts and approves content in Google Docs. To accommodate this, we built a Google Extension that allows content editors to export their content from Google Docs into clean HTML, including footnotes markup. This has dramatically reduced Free Press’ time in getting their content from internal approval to published on the web.
The components available to them include:
- Accordions
- Calls to action
- Embedded videos
- Footnotes
- Inline images
- Interactive charts
- Question and Answer sections
- “Read more” elements
- Statistics
- Timelines
ActionKit Integration for Increased Mobilization
Free Press mobilizes people to fight for equitable access to technology. They advocate for diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, transparency in big corporate media, and for journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what’s actually happening in their communities.
Journalism in the United States has not been under attack to this degree since the Gilded Age or the Nixon administration, and Free Press’ work is more relevant than ever.
Previously, the Free Press site’s integration with ActionKit was superficial, taking users off FreePress.net, leaving visitors with a clumsy user experience. Taking advantage of Drupal’s amenability to third-party APIs, DevCollab built a thorough integration with ActionKit that weaves forms into the main website and gives users a smooth experience, all within FreePress.net. With its Drupal-ActionKit integration, Free Press helps thousands of people email the FCC, sign open letters to the largest media tech companies, and lobby their elected officials.
Stronger Storytelling, Stronger Results
Total traffic, active users, views per active user, average engagement time per user, and event counts on FreePress.net are all up significantly since the redesigned website launched on April 9th.
Much of Free Press’s metrics are at the whim of current events. It’s likely some of this increase is the result of current events; more people are turning to Free Press for guidance and ways to fight. The metrics that stand out, though, are around engagement. Total traffic ebbs and flows with the headlines, but on average, the extent to which site users are digging in and engaging with Free Press’ content and actions is what makes a difference. To see that site engagement is consistently higher since the redesign is encouraging, from both a communication strategy perspective, as well as for the sake of our democracy.
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