Staying nimble with Drupal

What are the results you are trying to achieve? How can your web site help you get those results? These are a couple of questions we're starting to ask all our clients, and what we're finding often reveals some very easy things we can do to drive more results, quickly and easily.

The MIT Enterprise Forum of the NW puts on very interesting, entertaining, educational programs through the winter months. With the rise of a huge number of meetups and other organizations competing for an audience, one of the biggest challenges has been a declining audience, fewer people coming to events. They are doing a lot of different initiatives to rebuild their audience, including social media, partnering with specific industry associations for particular events, trying out different social media outlets, and doing more video.

So much of this is about content, so our biggest advice is to get more conversations going with their audience -- using social media to find people who are already talking about a topic, and asking them to do some guest blogging or write about our events to their audience.

But the new chair of the organization last week had a request that sounded a lot more substantial -- can we sell a season ticket that includes all events? And the answer was, why yes, this is pretty easy to do. We turned on the uc_packagekit module, added all the events into a package, and within 1/2 hour, we had the season package up and available for purchase.

For another client, one of our developers went over to the client site for some on-site support. After reviewing all the manual steps their admin assistant was doing to collect a list of registrations in their conference system, he was able to suggest a change we could implement in a few minutes that saved the admin some 40 hours per year!

Neither of these changes required any code. In Drupal, these are changes that can be done by a knowledgable administrator. Too often we find clients accepting shortcomings in their sites that we can easily fix if we knew they were a problem -- which is why it's so important for us to understand what your business goals are, how you currently accomplish them, and how we might make things better for you.

Frustrated with your Drupal site? Drop us a line and let's schedule a time to talk! We can almost certainly make it much better!