Focused Education Resources: Supporting K-12 Excellence
- Education
Focused Education Resources is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting excellence in K-12 education in British Columbia. Serving school districts, independent schools and First Nations schools, they offer a comprehensive suite of services that optimize every aspect of education delivery, from professional learning opportunities and classroom resource evaluations to technology and infrastructure procurement.
In 2023, Focused Education Resources launched a Privacy & Technology resource centre designed for districts and schools across the province so that they would be able to successfully build and implement Privacy Management Programs within their organizations.
The Challenge
An oasis of knowledge hidden behind technical limitations.
Focused Education Resources and Affinity Bridge have collaborated since 2021 on several projects to advance key initiatives and deliver service improvements through their website and integrated systems. At times, this work bumped up against aging or incomplete legacy infrastructure that limited effective communication with key audiences.
The content was challenging to publish and find on the website, creating additional work for employees who needed to email members about where they could find, access, and utilize specific materials. Different business groups also needed help with service management issues related to the legacy theme and systems that had resulted in a confusing user interface and slower progression toward meeting member expectations.
Finally, the rising demand for expanded resource libraries to meet emerging privacy and technology needs required a fresh approach.
Client
- Focused Education Resources
Sector
- Education
Service
- Strategy
- User Experience
- Content
- Design
- Development
Technology
- Drupal
The Solution
Make it beautiful, flexible, and friendly to use.
Knowing that their team and members both faced challenges sharing services and resources, we proposed a theme rebuild to create a new website that is easy to use, manage, and navigate, underpinned by a strong technical foundation allowing the flexibility to grow long into the future.
Collaboration is everything.
We collaborated with executives, project leaders and service departments to uncover different content management needs, reveal ‘wish list’ functionality, and target key service requirements, while building internal consensus on universal website behaviours and designs.
Stakeholders participated in customized design, content and development sessions to co-create a vision that ensured solutions remained consistent and unified throughout the site. This strategic process resulted in new landing pages, navigation, and content libraries, supported by flexible Layout Builder components and templates that allow staff to create, re-create, customize, and publish consistent and intuitive experiences across the website.
Content, managed.
Enhancements to the CMS, including search and accessibility updates throughout the site, generated new opportunities for the Focused Education team to communicate and showcase the organization’s impact, and improved how members find and access services and content.
We addressed the file management challenges by creating new resource listings with search, layout, imagery, and member access management controls. This allowed them to turn static pages with lists of links into beautiful and functional multi-topic content libraries that can grow over time.
