Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Tom Metcalfe
Jonathan Garrett
Daniel Lindsay
David Weston
David Fairbrother
Arfaan Anjum
Tom Davis
Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
VMG API Library: https://github.com/reason-digital/virgin-money-giving-api
Dementia is the biggest health threat facing society today and there are currently no effective treatments to slow, prevent or cure it. Today, almost one million people in the UK are living with a form of dementia, the most common one being Alzheimer’s disease. Sadly, one in three of us will be affected by dementia in some way.
Today, 50 million people are living with dementia across the world. Too often they struggle alone, feeling as though their world has been turned upside down and often facing prejudice or misunderstanding.
But no more. A revolution is growing – on the streets and in the laboratories. Scientists are gaining on dementia, pioneering breakthroughs and transforming lives.
It is time to bring dementia out of the shadows and set things straight.
As Charity of the Year for the 2019 Virgin Money London Marathon, Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK are joining forces for a year-long campaign to power groundbreaking dementia research, overthrow old attitudes and lead the charge towards a cure.
Dementia Revolution needed a site for the 2019 Virgin Money London Marathon where runners could sign up and pay for their marathon place.
Reason Digital, a social enterprise which works exclusively with charity, not-for-profit and the third sector on pro-social digital projects, was chosen to deliver it.
About the project
Alzheimer’s Society (AS) and Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) have been jointly awarded the status of nominated partner charity of the Virgin Money London Marathon (VMLM) 2019. Working together, the two charities will recruit and fundraise under the campaign branding #DementiaRevolution (#DM). Money raised under this banner will fund a project: The Dementia Research institute (DRI). With this in mind, a site was needed to bring together an army of runners and their supporters to raise money to fund research into perhaps the key health issue of our time.
Branding
The new Dementia Revolution branding was taken to the web by Reason Digital using the blue and pink colours. These are embedded through the site with the ‘paint splats’ and call to action buttons.
Runner sign up forms
Dementia Revolution needed to manage the applications for the limited amount of ‘Gold Bond’ places they are given by the marathon organisers. These places are given out to charities free of charge. In turn charities reserve these places for runners who will raise the maximum amount of fundraising.
Additional forms were needed for people who wanted to run for Dementia Revolution and pay for a place and volunteers who wanted to cheer runners on the day of the marathon.
Optionally, runners could opt-in to have Virgin Money Giving pages created for them when signing up to run for Dementia Revolution. Reason Digital developed an open source package for interacting with the Virgin Money Giving API.
All of the submissions needed to be pushed to the Dementia Revolution’s CRM called NTT.
Virgin Money Giving subdomain
Dementia Revolution needed an area of the site to dedicate to marketing and information materials for the Virgin Money Giving staff. This was put under a subdomain (https://vm.dementiarevolution.org) to keep the content separate.
Key metrics (April 16th - Dec 16th)
- 6,448 Gold Bond sign ups at a 6% conversion rate
- 83,000 visits
- 13.47% return visits
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen as it gave Dementia Revolution powerful content and user management out of the box. Combined with the paragraph modules this allowed Dementia Revolution to create engaging content.
Drupal gave Reason Digital a solid base on which to build an integration with Dementia Revolution’s CRM called NTT. In addition to that a second integration was built with the Virgin Money Giving API to create fundraising pages for runners.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Paragraphs
The Paragraphs module has been used to allow content editors to create complex layouts from a pre-set list of paragraph types. These range in complexity from a classic WYSIWYG area right up to a list of related content items.
Media modules
The media suite of modules were chosen to allow content editors to add and re-use imagery, videos and downloads across the site. These modules provide a ‘library’ view for editors to pick from or upload new items to.
Webform
The Webform module (https://www.drupal.org/project/webform) provides the backbone of the various runner registration forms. For forms where runners needed to pay for their place, the Webform Stripe module (https://www.drupal.org/project/webform_stripe) was used to take payments.
Virgin Money Giving API
The Virgin Money Giving API developers are working on a PHP SDK, but no completion date is set.
As the Virgin Money Giving API has many undocumented quirks we decided to create a package to interact with the API (https://github.com/reason-digital/virgin-money-giving-api) and open source it.
This package although limited takes away a lot of the pain of interacting with the Virgin Money Giving API and can be used today, by anyone.
