Campaign for America's Future

Website: Campaign for America's Future

Client: Campaign for America's Future

Dates: September 2007 - January 2008

Scope: 75 Developer Days

Partners: Advomatic, Accelerant Studios, 2Binc

Description: OurFuture.org is the result of consolidating several previously distinct websites, and the development of organizationally-unprecedented user-generated-content functionality. Prior to the project, the Campaign For America’s Future was spread across Convio, Kintera, Movable Type and Drupal, with a few other hosted services in the mix for specific projects and campaigns without a consistent design or any standard way for editorial management of content.

After Chapter Three’s engagement, the entire web presence was unified, a bold new look and feel had been applied, and a robust community/networking area was born.

Features:

• Organizational Content Sections:The new OurFuture.org site features a dynamic magazine-like layout and feel for all its major issue areas. Built on the power of Drupal, these areas (e.g. “New Energy”) are automatically populated with a mix of fresh and editorially-promoted content. Each major issue area has four standard sub-sections, and contains a mix of content including: blogs, polling data, talking points, inspirational stories, external news headlines, full briefs and reports.

  In addition, the Drupal engine powers a sister site for the Institute for America’s Future, CAF’s think tank, at institute.ourfuture.org. Content published there is automatically fed into the OurFuture.org queues, allowing automatic publication of research and policy papers on the main campaign site.

• User Generated Content: Prior to this project, CAF had invited community participation sporadically. Comment threads here, a call for personal stories there. Chapter Three designed and developed a streamlined publication interface for their users which presented all the new options — blogs, headlines, stories and more — intuitively and elegantly.
• Broadcast: Pulling together functionality from a number of contributed Drupal modules, we developed a unified “Broadcast” interface to be implemented throughout the site, inviting users and casual surfers to help spread the Campaign message via email to their friends as well as on social media sites like Digg, Reddit and Furl.
• Ratings and Ranking: Another core element of the User Generated Content system is the ability to rate and rank nearly any kind of content. The site also tracks and score all sorts of user activity, from the number of friends they make, to the comments they post to the broadcasts they send, and assemble this into a number of different “honors” which users can receive. The site also includes leaderboards for each criteria to help tap into people’s natural competitive energy.