The Awakening America project is a combination of complex technologies combined into a single, easy to use system. The primary project is built on Expression Engine. In addition to Expression Engine’s ability to make the site easy to manage, a custom application was also developed from scratch to manage the vast number of state, county, and church participants in the Awakening America program.
The application contains a list of every county in the United States. The visitor starts off with selecting a state from an interactive map, and is then shown a list of all the counties in that state. Once the visitor has selected a county they are shown the coordinator for that county. If no coordinator currently exists, they are asked if they have an interest in becoming the coordinator for that county. The administration of this system has built in CSV exporting, sorting by state, and the ability to approve or deny new applicants.
The administrative area of the site was developed using an Ruby on Rails 3. One of the core features of this application is the ability for state coordinators to manage their own counties. They can add new coordinators, approve existing applications, or update the details of a coordinator within their own state.
The Expression Engine application is hosted on a Linux LAMP server that was setup and maintained by Winters Technology Group. The Ruby application, and its development environment are located on Heroku.
More than just a technical achievement. The Awakening America website is a case study in successful social marketing. WTG sent out hundreds of thousands of emails to coordinators, potential participants, and the general public. In addition to encouraging people to share the site on facebook and twitter, we also developed and ran a successful facebook advertising campaign to recruit church pastors to participate in the event.
WTG also produced the original graphic artwork for the website, email templates, landing pages, magazine advertisements, and viral marketing materials. Our professional graphics team was able to bring its talent to bear on this exciting and challenging project with great results.
This was a very large project for this size nonprofit organization. With only a handful of full time staff members, WTG was able to double the size of staff working on this project. Our team included an On-Site Project Manager, Senior Ruby on Rails web Developer, Expression Engine Developer, and two Graphic Designers.
Our team was able to work not only with the staff of Awakening America, but also volunteer staff members for the 9/11 event from around the country and the Matti Media Group Public Relations team in Colorado. We approached the project in Agile fashon to adapt to the constantly changing needs of the organization.
Needless to say this was a challenging and fulfilling project for all of our team members. This project further proved that is pays to be able to adapt in this every changing media environment.
