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Speaking Up to End Poverty Using a Drupal Website

Today is your day to speak up and do something to help end poverty. The United Nations Millennium Campaign is gathering people around the world today to stand up against poverty and in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The campaign – called Stand up Speak Out – takes place over just 24 hours, and last year 23 million people stood up against poverty, setting the world record for the most people standing up for a cause. The event is more than halfway over now and looks like it is well on its way to beating its own record.

For the last two months we’ve been working with Jason Wojciechowski and his team at the UN Millennium Campaign on the Stand Up Speak Out website. StandAgainstPoverty.org is a Drupal site that Jason built last year on 4.7 and that we helped him redesign and improve for this year's event (it now runs 5.2). We had a blast coming up with ways to make it easier for people to participate in the campaign online and for the UN Millennium Campaign to really show off the huge numbers of people that are standing up against poverty.

For months now organizers around the world have been mobilizing to set up events where people could join together in person to stand up, and for the past month they’ve been registering these events at StandAgainstPoverty.org. Organizers are now returning to the site to log the number of people that participated in local events and upload their photos. So far 2,018 photos have been uploaded to Flickr showing people from around the world – from school children in India to office workers in Portland – standing up against poverty. We had a lot of fun working on the site’s Flickr implementation – users submit the photos on their event page on the Drupal site, and then the images are tagged with the event title and uploaded into the campaign's Flickr account. It makes for a great Flickr feed and should save the UN Millennium Campaign a ton of time.

For the first time this year users who can't attend a physical event can “stand up” online and join in the attempt to break the world record.  This is a great option to offer users, especially considering the increasing number of people the UN Millennium Campaign has been able to engage online in recent months. They're working with Change.org to facilitate online actions for English-speaking users.  They also built a Facebook app. 

Since Change.org doesn't yet have multilingual support and Stand Up Speak Out is collecting information in five languages, they chose to collect information for other languages by using the combined toolsets of Drupal and Democracy in Action, a powerful CRM tool for non-profits. Drupal's robust internationalization support and ease of use for translators (the Stand Up Speak Out campaign helped fund recent UI work on the l10n_client module) made it simple for users to stand up in any language, and Democracy in Action's great API allowed us to pass all the information into that system for easy reporting later on.

With less than 4 hours remaining in the campaign, everything seems to be running very smoothly. We're excited to see what happens with it! A big congrats to Jason and everyone else involved in organizing this for a successful event and a great Drupal site.

If you haven't yet, join in the activity and be part of a world record! Stand up online against poverty now at http://www.standagainstpoverty.org. You can only participate until 5 pm EDT, so please take action soon. We did this morning : )