Aedes.nl, the online platform for the national organisation promoting the interests of housing associations in the Netherlands
Case description
Aedes is the national organisation promoting the interests of practically every social housing association in the Netherlands, on all possible fronts. Housing associations manage 2.4 million rental homes, in which 4 million people live. Together, these houses make up about a third of the Dutch housing stock. The core task of housing associations is to provide good and affordable housing for people who, for whatever reason, need a helping hand. A total of 272 housing associations are members of Aedes, which is almost all housing associations in the Netherlands. Aedes represents their interests, supports them in carrying out their tasks and offers them a platform for knowledge exchange and meeting.Online, Aedes performs these tasks via Aedes.nl, the 'Mijn Aedes' (My Aedes) platform and the associated Communities section.
Aedes.nl is the place where members and other stakeholders can retrieve the information that is relevant to them. A place where members find an overview of specific knowledge organized in themes and topics, including the shortage of affordable housing, and the nitrogen (stikstof) debate.
In Mijn Aedes, members and stakeholders manage their connection with Aedes, register for events and workshops and indicate which topics they want to be kept informed about.
The members and stakeholders can exchange knowledge and expertise with each other (and Aedes) in the Communities platform through different topics. This is intended for mutual discussion, cooperation, and sharing opinions and knowledge.
The entire Aedes platform is built in Drupal. The public websites Aedes.nl, the My Aedes section, but also the highly interactive Communities. Drupal runs within an ecosystem of multiple applications, where single sign-on via Microsoft Active Directory and the connection with the underlying CRM are the main focus. Drupal retrieves the important information from the source systems, such as the CRM, and displays it in an accessible way for the members and stakeholders, ensuring relevance and context, co-creation, self-direction and ownership.
URLs and logins:
www.aedes.nl
MijnAedes (via Aedes.nl), Splashawards login: tvanvliet@finalist.nl / Splash2022!
Aedes communities (via aedes.nl), Splashawards login: tvanvliet@finalist.nl / Splash2022!
Case goals and results
Aedes wanted to renew the old website and transform it into an online platform that meets the wishes and needs of the members. This required a well thought through design and UX, as well as a content management system (CMS) that meets modern standards and offers possibilities to integrate functionalities, either via additional modules of the CMS or with API links. The design and UX were created by Osage.In order to improve the findability of the content on this online platform, it was necessary to revise the information structure. Some essential functionalities were externally linked to the website, such as communities, newsletters and logging in to the website. The goal was to integrate these in the new platform.
Ultimately, all elements - website, myAedes and AedesCommunities - were delivered fully integrated in Drupal. Aedes wants to facilitate its members by organizing its information via the Aedes.nl platform. It resulted in a platform where members and other stakeholders can retrieve the information that is relevant to them and where they can leave their own vision and opinion. A place where members find an overview of specific knowledge organized in themes and topics, including the shortage of affordable housing, and the nitrogen (stikstof) debate.
Replacing Embrace as communities platform, the new Communities part has a large share in the interactivity and added value of the online platform. There are different types of communities:
Open communities (accessible to anyone with an account) and 3 types of closed communities:
- only for Aedes members (these are only visible if someone is logged in as an Aedes member and the request does not have to be approved by the administrator);
- only for Aedes members with a certain position (all Aedes members can apply for membership and the administrator allows or denies them);
- communities where participants can only join by invitation.
Goals achieved in the online platform:
1. Relevance and context have become more important
2. Acceleration through co-creation
3. Self-direction and ownership
Main functions: topics, news, publications, meetings & events (including showing events from and registration directly in CRM), newsletters, search functionality (also providing results from external non-Drupal platforms such as the newsletter application), community with profiles and interactive discussion platform, groups and messages.
This project has Drupal in its ultimate power through a combination of website, customer portal and community. This shows the value of Drupal over other solutions.
Challenges
Challenges:- Notification system, with alerts that respond to your preferences that can easily be selected, via an integration with Mailcamp, which sends out the email notifications in a secure way;
- A real sophisticated Single Sign On solution that is provided via the Aedes.nl (Drupal) website, integrated with Azure Active Directory, which migrated from Keycloak. This Single Sign On system is used for all Aedes applications that are provided online, so also the non-Drupal-systems. For instance: registering for an events takes place in the CRM-system registration pages, but in a seamless process coming from the website.
- A full migration from the previous Communities system (a separate application, but now fully built in Drupal) including comments, poll, documents, all retrieved from the API of the former Communities application. Making heavy use of the Migrate module, this was quite the challenge, but the result speaks for itself.
- Per community, documents can be divided into folders by the community members. The folder system was built on Drupal’s good old taxonomy system.
- A timeline where everything you follow comes up, shown aggregated. This means that every user has a unique experience in My Aedes and the related Communities section.
- Finally, a keen and consistent UX/UI, in collaboration with OSAGE, which was a challenge in the sense that Aedes has an information function with a wide range of topics and themes for multiple target groups. The combination of navigation and tagging has been cleverly used to provide the visitor with the correct information.
Community contributions
Community contributions:- The module https://www.drupal.org/project/openid_connect_windows_aad (which is also maintained by Finalist members) was used and further improved. The module provides us with the single sign on functionality.
- Yoast module / Realtime SEO for Drupal provided patch for an error that some users, including us, experienced: https://www.drupal.org/node/3204291
Categories
Non-profit
Date when website went live
1 year 2 months ago
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