DrupalCon Seattle 2019: Personalizing the Teach for America applicant journey
Teach for America’s (TFA) site seeks to convey TFA’s mission, describe their approach and theory of change and start the application process for people interested in joining the corps. For applicants, there is also a logged-in experience for a rigorous online application process that unfolds over a period of several months.
During this session, DrupalCon participants will learn how TFA reimagined and redesigned its website with the goal of providing users personalized information about the state of their application and links to quickly rejoin the process at the appropriate stage. When TFA kicked off this work its .org site and the application site were wholly separate. Adding to the personalization challenge, applicants are placed in one of 51 school districts across the country, each with its own education system, character, and set of issues. Working with an outside partner, Blue State Digital, on a tight deadline, TFA began the project with a complete overhaul of the user experience.
The following outlines the process of the project and key takeaways for audience members:
We used atomic design, leveraging Pattern Lab, to standardize the look and feel across the .org and the application sites — while making sure both were beautiful.
We migrated the .org from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, and in the process consolidated content from 50+ regional websites into a single site.
We implemented single sign-on to streamline the experience for users as they move between information resources on the .org site (Drupal) and the application process site (built in Java).
From this base, we were able to implement personalization in the .org site to continuously communicate where the user is in the application process. For example, since the application and vetting process can span several months, an application returning to TeachForAmerica.org will receive a notification on the homepage of any upcoming deadlines at their particular stage in the process. By integrating with TFA’s other systems when a user logged in, we could determine how the user was connected to TFA and, if an applicant, where they were in the application process. We then used that information to render content for that user type on the front-end (eg.a button that says “Join Today” and links to the registration form for a brand-new visitor might read “Continue Application” and link to the applicant center for a user who is in the middle of the application process).. We combined this with a custom entity type so that content editors could easily update the personalized content without needing to make a code change.
Importantly all of the above was accomplished through a close working relationship between TFA’s developers and Blue State Digital. This session will be co-presented with Teach For America and Blue State Digital.
During this session, DrupalCon participants will learn how TFA reimagined and redesigned its website with the goal of providing users personalized information about the state of their application and links to quickly rejoin the process at the appropriate stage. When TFA kicked off this work its .org site and the application site were wholly separate. Adding to the personalization challenge, applicants are placed in one of 51 school districts across the country, each with its own education system, character, and set of issues. Working with an outside partner, Blue State Digital, on a tight deadline, TFA began the project with a complete overhaul of the user experience.
The following outlines the process of the project and key takeaways for audience members:
We used atomic design, leveraging Pattern Lab, to standardize the look and feel across the .org and the application sites — while making sure both were beautiful.
We migrated the .org from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, and in the process consolidated content from 50+ regional websites into a single site.
We implemented single sign-on to streamline the experience for users as they move between information resources on the .org site (Drupal) and the application process site (built in Java).
From this base, we were able to implement personalization in the .org site to continuously communicate where the user is in the application process. For example, since the application and vetting process can span several months, an application returning to TeachForAmerica.org will receive a notification on the homepage of any upcoming deadlines at their particular stage in the process. By integrating with TFA’s other systems when a user logged in, we could determine how the user was connected to TFA and, if an applicant, where they were in the application process. We then used that information to render content for that user type on the front-end (eg.a button that says “Join Today” and links to the registration form for a brand-new visitor might read “Continue Application” and link to the applicant center for a user who is in the middle of the application process).. We combined this with a custom entity type so that content editors could easily update the personalized content without needing to make a code change.
Importantly all of the above was accomplished through a close working relationship between TFA’s developers and Blue State Digital. This session will be co-presented with Teach For America and Blue State Digital.