Case description
Alzheimer Nederland is committed to help people with dementia live a more qualitative life and determined to strive for a future without dementia. Three different digital platforms play an important role in this: dementie.nl, alzheimer-nederland.nl and samendementievriendelijk.nl. In 2019, Alzheimer Nederland and Hoppinger joined forces towards a future-proof, digital strategy. A strategy based on centralised data and an integrated technical architecture, while the end user still benefits from three specific applications, matching each specific job to be done and the overall organisational goals of Alzheimer Nederland.Step 1 was the renewal of the dementie.nl platform: a community platform with Drupal CMS that supports informal carers as best as possible in the care of their loved ones, in all phases of dementia. Step 2: a relaunch of the samendementievriendelijk.nl platform, an initiative of Alzheimer Nederland and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. On samendementievriendelijk.nl visitors register themselves and follow a free online training to learn how to recognise the signs of dementia and how to act and help people with dementia in an appropriate and supportive manner, which contributes to a dementia friendly Netherlands. Samendementievriendelijk.nl is based on dementie.nl and both platforms are part of the same architecture with the same codebase. However, both have their own headless Drupal CMS, frontend and styling. Thanks to this structure, they benefit from each other's technical developments and both platforms can use functional components, such as the extensive e-learning tool. At the same time, the different business units within such a large organisation can independently follow their own marketing and content strategy focused on different target groups to achieve the objectives of each platform.
Also, the corporate website alzheimer-nederland.nl will be integrated shortly to enjoy the benefits of the shared architecture, and the benefits of Drupal as a central content management system to manage all the content in this multi-channel, multi-platform digital strategy.
Case goals and results
The objective of Samen dementievriendelijk is to make the Dutch society dementia friendly by offering year-round campaigns aimed at behavioural change through national tv, social media and an extensive training programme, both online and offline. This approach is focused on a learning strategy; learning how to recognise the signs of dementia will help people to act in an appropriate and supportive manner. The platform samendementievriendelijk.nl already exists for many years but has been replatformed by Hoppinger and for future purposes rebuild into a shared future-proof architecture including a fully equipped e-learning component. Since the go-live on April 5th 2022 as much as 20.000 people registered for the online training. Also, the number of people finishing the course has increased with 10%. The goal of the shared technical architecture was to increase the speed and ease of development for all platforms. The benefits are already visible: the e-learning component of samendementievriendelijk.nl will be added to the website of dementie.nl shortly, with considerably less time and resources compared to building it from scratch!Challenges
The innovative multi-platform architecture was the biggest challenge of this project. There were many questions that needed to be answered to ensure the right end result. What are the needs for each platform? What shared functionalities do we build and what maintains autonomous? How do we make sure the code remains structured and clean? The two platforms are part of the same architecture but operate independently from each other within their own domain, own frontend and headless Drupal CMS. The platforms thus have a uniform and recognisable styling, but keep their own branding and specific functionality. Between the backend and the frontend there is a shared layer, consisting of the shared code. Both platforms, and soon also alzheimer-nederland.nl, benefit from the code in that shared layer.Samendementievriendelijk started off as a copy of dementie.nl with extra functionality added to the Drupal CMS in the form of custom building blocks. Where Drupal is used for all components related to information and communication, we have integrated an interactive module into Drupal by using .NET: the e-learning module that is used for training on dealing with dementia. This e-learning module, and other functionalities that can be used for multiple platforms, is included in the shared layer. The different Drupal CMS’s have exactly the same structure so that shared building blocks can be easily copied from one platform to another. This way the platforms can benefit from the same developments, now or later.
Community contributions
The project samendementievriendelijk.nl is a best practice example of an application with a headless Drupal CMS as part of a multi-platform architecture, with both platform specific and shared components. Alzheimer Nederland and the affiliate platforms as Drupal users are well-known organisations in the Netherlands and together welcome around 2 million visitors on the two platforms samendementievriendelijk.nl and dementie.nl on a yearly basis.Categories
Non-profit
Date when website went live
1 year 7 months ago
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