The backstory
The Civil Liberties Union for Europe is a network of European civil liberties organisations. Their primary focus is to boost the visibility of human rights at national and European Union levels. The cornerstone of the Platform is their news and e-participation website – liberties.eu.
In November 2013 we started working on the liberties.eu website and a custom content management system (CMS) that allows users from 14 countries to create, translate and publish human rights news, stories, videos, infographics, galleries and campaigns in 14 languages.
About the project
The client aimed at easy creation, translation and publication of content in multiple languages. They opted for a tailor made solution, instead of a ready-made CMS, because they knew that their project will grow and evolve and with time it will be much more difficult to adapt someone else’s code to their needs. It proved to be the right choice.
The CMS we built is intuitive and very straight forward. It features great functionality and ease of use. We call it Bertie (from liberties).
Challenges
From the very beginning we all knew that the complexity of the project is in the multi-level and multi-actor content management process with notifications and interactive workflow.
When Evermore started working with the Liberties, they were a young organization and they didn’t really have competitors. We couldn’t easily borrow a similar organization’s experience and translate it to our client’s needs. Together, we had to come up with the structure and the logic of the custom CMS, encompassing all possible user cases.
Bertie
A contributor writes a story, an editor approves it, the translators gets the green light to proceed in their language and finally a local editor approves the content to be released.
The CMS allows for editors to assign translations and schedule the publishing of the content. It also facilitates the exchange of comments between editors, writers and translators to keep the communication within the system and avoid external e-mailing.
Each content type comes with specific traits. For example, the campaigns feature the e-democracy tool that allows petitions, open letters or voting. Their purpose is to mobilize people in the human rights movement across the EU.
Another useful item is the option to share a piece with a blurb on Twitter or Facebook directly from the CMS. Ever since introducing this easy way of sharing, liberties.eu’s reach-out to people on social media has surged. And the client is very happy about it.
Bertie is equipped with an image repository that stores all the visuals the contributors had ever used. They are labeled with human rights related key words and can be easily searched for.
The CMS also features analytics and statistics to show how much content the national organizations post.
Technology stack
Outcome
The software we delivered makes all the contributors’ work easier. It’s fast, intuitive and answers all their needs and requirements. It’s ultimately user-friendly and saves a lot of resources and man-hours on the road of supporting human rights interests across the EU.
Liberties.eu has turned into the backbone of the Liberties' multilingual communication services. It has facilitated the creation of a great amount of content and reaching out to thousands of end-users every day.
We are very happy to be the technological partner of a non-governmental organization that works hard to raise awareness of human rights issues at national and EU levels.
Team setup
- 2 Developers
- UI Designer
- Project Manager
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