We recently launched a new website for a program at the World Resources Institute called EMBARQ, which works with cities in the developing world to implement sustainable transportation projects. Along with their base in Washington, DC, EMBARQ has independent centers with a few dozen staff in six countries, an audience speaking at least four languages, and great original multimedia content. 

They needed a powerful new solution to feature their content and facilitate a decentralized content production and translation process that respected the uniqueness of each center in the network. They also wanted it to look incredible. We built a new website for them with Drupal and created a custom installer profile that allows each of their centers to quickly turn on their own customizable site, yet still benefit from the work of the entire network.

Part think tank and part nonprofit consultancy of sorts, EMBARQ works directly with governments from the municipal to the national level, as well as multi-national companies, to develop practical green transport projects. For instance, they’ve helped Mexico City develop a bus rapid transit system that’s an affordable mass transit alternative to building a subway system (clarification: Mexico City does have a subway system; BRT in general is an affordable alternative to subways). They’re always trying to reach out to new partners and spread the impact of green transportation solutions around the world.

For several years, they’ve had their main site on a custom .NET CMS, two of their five centers outside the the United States had their own unconnected websites, and the other centers haven’t been online at all. This obviously created a problem for maintaining their messaging and branding across the network, not to mention the efficiency loss from users in different places not having a way to easily share content. For their new solution, since EMBARQ works in diverse regions with different transportation needs and concerns, it was important that each of the centers could communicate to their local and regional audiences in their own languages and with completely unique content.  

The biggest win for EMBARQ with their move to Drupal is that all their centers now have a shared look and feel across their sites, with the same administration features to facilitate things like translation between languages. This helps them get more value out of their content, and it also makes life easier for their communications staff. By building unique installer profiles for each of their centers (rather than doing a multisite setup), each of the centers has complete freedom to take their sites and totally customize them with new features, without creating a significant maintenance burden for their central support staff. To pass content between sites in the network, EMBARQ is relying on the strengths of FeedAPI to aggregate content automatically between their different sites when relevant.

You can go to EMBARQ.org to check out some of the features on the site, including the multilingual video content that we helped them create with the open source JW Player 4 (more on that from Will White in an upcoming blog post). The new websites for their various centers will be launching in the coming months as content translations are finished. We’re excited to have helped EMBARQ build a beautiful new site that better suits their brand, a powerful new tool set for producing and translating multilingual content, and a Drupal implementation that unites their brand and distributes easy web publishing tools to their whole network to produce unique content in each country.