Online Community Management

Fit Kid Champions, a partner of the University of Michigan’s Project Healthy Schools, is an outreach program that encourages kids to “get moving”—part of a national campaign   promoted by Michelle Obama. The organization approached us with an idea for a web-based log that would allow kids to track their activity on a daily basis, join virtual teams, and earn points and recognition in the process. We worked closely with the staff of Fit Kid Champions to develop additional social features for the log, including the ability to upload images, see each other’s profiles and progress, and post messages to teammates. During the project, the log was also expanded to include more aspects of a healthy lifestyle, allowing kids to also track eating well and caring for others. The final product is currently in beta release and being tested with local schools.

Another project for the non-profit, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), START Toolkit is an online blueprint to help businesses to develop regional, sector-based partnerships. Member organizations have access to a resource-rich, collaborative text. Users are connected to each other through their subscribing organization and can securely and privately comment on, bookmark, and share information within their member group. Along with developing the functionality for the website, we worked with CSW to design an easy-to-use interface for navigating the abundant information provided through START Toolkit.

WillWorkforFood.org needed a complete site re-architecture, re-design, and re-implementation in order to complete their mission of raising a million dollars for Darfur relief. Switchback was sub-contracted to rebuild the entire site with a Drupal CMS backend, including integration of organic community groups, and e-commerce functionality. The community groups features are active and working while we are currently implementing additional e-commerce features for the site. Anyone can now easily register, create work efforts, and begin raising money for the Darfur relief effort. Administrators can easily add new pages, as well as edit the content of any page on the website.

The student-run newspaper for the University of North Carolina, The Daily Tar Heel, "is one of the most decorated college newspapers in the country." Priding themselves on top-notch journalism and state-of-the-art delivery, the staff wanted to upgrade their website to offer more of the industry-standard features found on national online newspapers. We partnered with Stunt3 Multimedia to build a online news delivery system that met the visionary demands of the Daily Tar Heel team, and could handle the tens of thousands of visitors they serve every month. The resulting product, CrystalType, integrates with WoodWing Enterprise, a leading newspaper publishing software suite, to provide push-button publishing to the web. For more information on CrystalType, visit www.crystaltype.com.

The Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW)—a non-profit organization that helps businesses, communities, educators and individuals succeed by facilitating connections between them—had developed a conceptual version of what they describe as “a resource directory meets web 2.0," known as WeToo. Wanting to take the project to the next level, they contracted us to implement a number of feature enhancements, build a more user-friendly look and feel, and upgrade their Drupal installation to accomodate future refinements. The WeToo website provides geomapped business resources that are searchable by a number of criteria, as well as an interactive community where members can create and join groups and post and share information, documents and events. We've launched a beta version of the new WeToo website and are actively working with CSW to plan future development.

Students and staff at Duke University's PhD program in ecology came to us with a goal: they wanted to transform their static departmental website into an active online community. We worked with them to build a dynamic, Drupal-based website that provides a number of social networking features, including customizable profiles, user blogs, events calendars, photo and document sharing, and moderated commenting. Additionally, we designed a clean and simple theme for the website; one that would accommodate a lot of interaction as well as future growth.