Development Seed Blog

RHRealityCheck.org Named the Best Electronic Forum in the Global Media Awards

A big congratulations to RH Reality Check for winning a Global Media Award from the Population Institute!  I’ve been lucky enough to work on both ends of this project, first working to get this publication off the ground with RH Reality Check and then working to improve the website and the technology that drives it with Development Seed.  I know the team at RH Reality Check works hard to gather and put out great information on sexual and reproductive health and rights and works to stay on the cutting edge.  The work they have done to build a dynamic, issue-specific news hub is really impressive.

From the Population Institute:

“RH Reality Check will receive the Best Electronic Forum award for its commitment to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights. The website is an easily accessible online resource for evidence-based information, provocative commentary and interactive dialogue on these issues.”

It’s great to see the website get this recognition for accomplishing its goals. RH Reality Check was started back in 2006 with the aim to make credible information more accessible to people in the reproductive health community and to become an online hub for people in this community.

Development Seed teamed up with them to help them do this. When RH Reality Check came together, the format was a relatively simple blog layout. Within six months, they had brought together close to 100 authors and were posting content several times a day – ranging from breaking news stories and political commentary to stories about the real-world impact of different policies on women and children around the world. The website underwent a dramatic transformation to better feature the wide variety of content and turned from a blog into a newspaper-style website designed to showcase their content, make it easy to find related information and blog posts, and highlight the well-known experts that blog for RH Reality Check. The layout was made easy for their team to update by using Drupal’s panels module, nodequeue, and node as block.  

We also set RH Reality Check up with a version of Managing News to help them track all the news that was being published in their field and easily republish the stories they found most relevant to their readers. We continue to work with their team to maintain the website and keep improving it.

But this technology wouldn’t matter without the great editors and contributors at RH Reality Check who make sure the publication puts out excellent information that its supporters want to read.  Congrats again to the whole team, and nice work.