Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is an international centre of excellence in child health care, and one of the UK's biggest charities. The hospital website provides vital information to clinical professionals, parents and child patients. The charity depends on its website to support campaigns which look to raise £100m per year.

The hospital's mission is to provide world-class clinical care and training, and to pioneer new research and treatments in partnership with other organisations for the benefit of children around the world.

The previous platform, a proprietary CMS, was hindering efforts towards achieving these goals. It could not handle substantial traffic loads, was difficult to edit, and was expensive to maintain. GOSH decided it was time for significant change, and reached out to CTI Digital for help.

Primary Objective

GOSH needed a single harmonised platform. This would be compiled from the migration of 2 large, business-critical sites (6,000 nodes and 30 content types per site), as well as 10 sub-sites to Drupal from an outdated proprietary software.

GOSH’s mantra is “The Child First and Always”. CTI Digital set out with the objective that our solution would embody this principle.

Extended discovery phase
Discovery workshops conducted by business analysts, solution architects, and user experience designers resulted in establishing a comprehensive understanding of organisational goals. It also ensured GOSH made informed decisions about what was being proposed for their site. While this was at odds with the client’s preferred way of working of seeing code being written early on, we began the process with careful research and planning, which steered the project and led to success over the following months.

Agile Project Management
The cornerstone of the agile process is continuously adapting to change and getting feedback. As part of this process, our teams worked very closely together, focusing on assimilating feedback so that we could deliver the best possible product. We held regular sprint retrospectives internally, as well as frequent reviews with the client. Insight gained during both the retrospectives and reviews helped us remove impediments to delivery, respond to valuable user feedback, and reassess the scope of the project.

We managed the CMS and Migration projects in parallel. This helped to isolate the risk of the migration from the more predictable CMS build.

Accessibility and usability
The site is visited by a higher-than-average number of visitors with temporary and permanent visual impairments. Based upon advice provided to GOSH by RNIB, we implemented improved accessibility to achieve WCAG compliance.

Additionally, though it was not initially included in the project requirements, the team determined during discovery workshops that it would be imperative to include responsive design within the scope of work. We worked with GOSH to adapt their requirements to take advantage of Drupal’s existing functionality, which allowed us to expand the scope of the project to include responsive design without incurring any additional cost.

KPIs and performance
The entire project was steered by Key Performance Indicators that agreed with GOSH’s project board. These were metrics by which success was measured.

During every development sprint (and towards the culmination of the project) great emphasis was placed upon asserting that we robustly achieved results contributing toward the KPIs. For us, GOSH as a charity deserved the very best project outcomes.

Fast, relevant search contributes to a good user experience. Medical professionals may need this information with critical urgency. Anxious parents and children are searching clinical guidelines and learning about medical conditions. A powerful, fast and relevant search was an important requirement.

With Drupal’s Search API and fine tuning available with Acquia Platform we have developed a single search code base, rationalise down from over 20 unique solutions, which delivers well and is sustainable for the future (many less lines of code).

The 2 main websites (hospital and charity) have totally different objectives: facilitating patient visits and care, and fundraising. Presenting a cohesive design whilst addressing wildly different audiences demanded a smart approach.

Using StyleTiles afforded GOSH early access to our interpretation of their brand for both sites. Having over 15,000 pages between them, our interaction designers knew that the path to an effective visual design started with content modelling exercise, definition of user personas and journeys then rapid prototypes.

With interface requirements defined, we employed Atomic Design principles, well suited to expansive and complex systems. Using a living Style Guide allowed us theme the many types of content within the two sites in an efficient way by promoting reuse of components.

Fast, relevant search contributes to a good user experience. Medical professionals may need this information with critical urgency. Anxious parents and children are searching clinical guidelines and learning about medical conditions. A powerful, fast and relevant search was an important requirement.

With Drupal’s Search API and fine tuning available with Acquia Platform we have developed a single search code base, rationalise down from over 20 unique solutions, which delivers well and is sustainable for the future (many less lines of code).

To make most effective use of staff and limited resources, GOSH needed a solution that provided excellent outcomes through self-service, and was not limited to patients.

Drupal’s highly adaptable administrative interfaces and powerful Workbench Moderation tools enabled us to tailor carefully considered administrative interfaces for the hundreds of content contributors, ranging from doctors to charity campaigners. This ultimately reduced training overhead.

GOSH maintains many microsites across its two larger sites. For example, there are microsites for specific fundraising campaigns, which causes site administration to be vastly complex-- not to mention that different interaction designs disrupted the user experience and contributed to an excess of code. As part of the redesign, it was determined that these microsites needed to be highly integrated into the larger sites themselves: operating from a shared code-base would reduce cost of ownership, and would allow new features to be more easily introduced to all microsites.

Content and commerce can easily be intertwined, GOSH are no longer constrained by their CMS, indeed all options are open and being capitalised upon. Whilst discrete sites, the content management system is one and the same. Appropriate access privileges and flexible security boundaries are achieved using Drupal’s powerful Organic Groups module.

Personalisation is achieved by funnelling visitors rapidly to site sections and microsites designed for their needs. Each section adopts message, tone, imagery, content and even Solr Search is adapted to the appropriate audience. This is a living series of sites where stakeholders have regained control and are able to adapt the content regularly, keeping it relevant.

When comparing Drupal against the legacy system for the same period (May 2014/2015 - May 2015/2016): 

1. Visitor traffic rising - 13% increase in visits
2. More donations - 11% improvement in conversion rate
3. Loyalty ascending - 10% improvement on return visits
4. Performance boost - average page download time down from 2800 ms to 1700 ms
5. Mobile visits have rocketed - from 46% to 58%
6. Design parameters exceeded 10 fold - performed under sustained traffic exceeding 10 times planned levels

Our solution promoted an integrated approach. Each sub-site is powered by common software. All sites inherit the same investment in responsive design, accessibility, usability, administrative efficiency.

The solution permits GOSH to quickly provision marketing and micro sites which promotes brand consistency:

Using existing modules like “Paragraphs” we were able to equip content creators creative freedom to introduce slideshows, emotive imagery and banners whilst retaining brand integrity. With Drupal, GOSH campaign managers are now able to manage visually appealing pages which create empathy and connection to donors, resulting in rewarding engagement strategies.

With just 5 weeks notice the BBC announced scheduled broadcast of the latest of the prime time documentary series Great Ormond Street Hospital

Thanks to our Agile Development practice and upon Acquia Platform we achieved what was hitherto impossible - release a major new site section with integration to the JustGiving Fundraising API in a previously impossible time frame.

Beyond the seamless visitor experience, GOSH were able to capture valuable profile information about donors that the native JustGiving hosted pages do not offer. By doing so we are empowering GOSH to enhance their relationship with donors by providing intelligence fueling personalisation.

Not long after the launch of the new site, GOSH partnered with The London Evening Standard, The Independent and Transport for London on their fundraiser, Give to GOSH Appeal.The fundraiser was supported and endorsed by celebrities including Sir Paul McCartney, which led to a tremendous surge in public interest in the organisation’s work.

During the fundraiser, the site handled traffic levels exceeding the design parameters by 10 fold, and still remained performant. The positive organisational impact of this project, in the ability to realise modern multi-channel fundraising campaigns, cannot be overstated: between 24 November and 14 February, the website played its part in helping to raise £3.5 million across all of the charity’s fundraising channels.

Drupal has allowed us to introduce fundraising journeys to the site in a flexible manner like never before. Naturally many patients become loyal supporters of the charity. Donate buttons and campaign calls to action can be subtly introduced within NHS hospital site, vice versa hospital content can be referenced to charity page .

A new Drupal 7 module was created to put powerful and time saving tools in the hands of content managers. The Lister module provides a new field type for Drupal 7, called "Listed content". It aims to provide an extendable method of allowing end users to create lists of content as they would any other field.

Lister fields are plugin based to allow for the list to be generated in multiple ways. Plugins included in submodules are EFQ (EntityFieldQuery), RSS, Views and Menu Children. A base class ListerPlugin is provided which can be extended for custom plugins.

For GOSH adopting an open source mentality and showing thought leadership to their peers was an important principle. We are delighted this module will soon be a Drupal project available for all.