Drupal at Scale: Mars’ 400 Sites and World Cancer Day’s AI Lessons

Mars replaced three-week developer tickets with five-minute self-service edits. The World Cancer Day team learned exactly where AI helps — and where it has no place. Two case studies in moving fast without losing the human at the center.

Charles Revkin and Anthony Bojocan’s session from DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, recorded Wednesday 30 September 2026, Keynote track.

 

 

About this session

Baddý Sonja Breidert, Co-Founder and CEO of 1xINTERNET, opens the second Rotterdam keynote with a direct answer to the previous day’s DriesNote call for advocacy: bring the case studies to the main stage. After a video message from Omar Mohsine, the UN’s Open Source Coordinator, on how the United Nations standardized hundreds of websites on Drupal, Anthony Bojocan, Global Web Delivery Senior Lead at Mars, takes over with the scale of the problem — a family-owned company founded in 1911, operating across 78 markets with 170,000 associates and more than 350 websites. When GDPR enforcement arrived in 2018, it exposed a fragmented estate of more than ten overlapping CMSs, duplicated cost, and world-class brands underserved online.

Mars’s answer was the Mars Experience Platform: a single Drupal foundation now carrying more than 400 properties across more than 54 countries, with a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership and new brand sites — like Tru Fru in the UK and France — launched in two weeks. Anthony then walks through the next bet: choosing Drupal Canvas for the editorial experience, piloting it on the API Fishcare brand with JAKALA in a 12-week build, and the results — component development 40% faster, 80% less demand for new components, and the three-week Jira ticket replaced by a five-minute self-service edit.

The second half, from Charles Revkin, Senior Digital Strategy Manager at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), is deliberately not about technology. UICC is a 45-person team in Geneva running worldcancerday.org, where the United by Unique campaign invites people to share their own cancer stories. The team tried an AI chatbot for collecting stories and dropped it because it felt impersonal — then more than 600 submissions arrived in days and overwhelmed manual moderation. The fix, built with 1xINTERNET, was Drupal AI as a first-layer moderator: approving, flagging, or rejecting stories so that approved ones publish immediately while humans review everything else. It’s a working study in rejecting AI where it weakens the human experience and applying it where it supports human review.

"The future of enterprise web isn’t about writing more code. It’s about empowering more people.” — Anthony Bojocan

“We rejected AI where it weakened the human experience and we used AI where it could really support the human review.” — Charles Revkin

Key takeaways

  • Mars moved more than 400 properties onto a single Drupal platform after the 2018 GDPR deadline exposed the risks of running more than 10 overlapping CMSs, and reported a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership.
  • Mars chose Drupal Canvas for its editorial experience because it has no license fee or lock-in and is where Drupal core investment is going; it reported faster component development and website assembly and less demand for new components.
  • UICC dropped an AI chatbot for collecting cancer stories because it felt impersonal, and used a multi-step Webform that lets people share text, artwork, or video in their own words.
  • Drupal AI now does first-layer moderation of submitted stories (approve, flag, or reject), so approved stories publish right away while humans still review flagged content and everything that is published.
  • Both speakers stress starting from the problem rather than the technology, and keeping humans in the loop.

 

Chapters

  • 2:22 Opening: bringing Drupal case studies to the main stage
  • 3:39 Video message from the United Nations
  • 5:44 Anthony Bojocan: Mars and its digital ecosystem
  • 9:55 The 2018 GDPR reckoning
  • 13:21 North Star strategy and the Mars Experience Platform
  • 18:08 Strategic priorities: AEO, the agentic web and editorial experience
  • 19:31 Choosing Drupal Canvas
  • 22:14 The API Fishcare pilot project
  • 25:21 Demo: editing a homepage with Drupal Canvas
  • 27:31 Results: what changed with Drupal Canvas
  • 31:44 Conversation with Anthony: why Mars chose Drupal
  • 34:11 Charles Revkin: UICC and its websites
  • 38:20 World Cancer Day campaign video
  • 39:24 World Cancer Day: scale and the United by Unique theme
  • 44:03 Website features: resources, participation and storytelling
  • 47:45 Collecting stories: why an AI chatbot was dropped
  • 51:52 AI-assisted first-layer moderation with Drupal AI
  • 56:15 Results, lessons learned and what's next
  • 1:01:22 Closing conversation with Charles and Anthony

Full transcript

Opening: bringing Drupal case studies to the main stage

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [2:22]

Welcome everyone. I see that some people are still catching up on the sleep. So we heard Dries talk about yesterday advocacy, and we need to bring cases out here. And we listened to that very carefully, and we decided to bring out 2 amazing cases on stage today. I also want to show you my t-shirt. This is actually the t-shirt that when we go to events outside of our Drupal bubble, we do go out there as Drupal. So if you are interested in, if there is a local event going on in your region, then please reach out to us because we really want to encourage you to go out there as Drupal, not as your brand or your own agency, but we go there together and we try to make noise and talk more about Drupal out there. So let us know. But with that, we did get a video. Omar from the United Nations, he sent us a small video to start off our program of marketing Drupal a little bit more. So let's listen to what Omar has to say.

Video message from the United Nations

Omar Mohsine (video message) [3:39]

Omar Mohsine. Everyone, my name is Omar Mohsine, and I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to send you this message. I really wanted to be with you, but unfortunately I couldn't, but happy still to be addressing with you today. I'm the UN— first, allow me to introduce myself. I'm the UN Open Source Coordinator, but here I'm more talking to you about an experience I had when I joined the UN. I joined in 2009, and at that time I was in charge of maintaining number of websites that we had. And at the time, we had multiple platforms running multiple sites, and that did not allow us to have a centralized, more uniform way of managing our website, the look and feel, but most importantly, the security. I remember at the time we had several websites that were hacked. Obviously, given the political and visible part of work of the United Nations, that became a very big problem for us. So we decided at the time to standardize on websites, on platforms, and have everything into one. And after extensive assessment, we decided to standardize on Drupal. So today Drupal is the platform that enables the United Nations to speak with the world across hundreds of websites. It has become an important part of how we communicate our work, our programs, and our message to people around the world. I'm very proud that we have achieved this together with you, with the Drupal community, and grateful to every one of you here today in the room. Grateful for all of you who contribute to making the platform what it is today. I'm again sorry I couldn't be with you in Rotterdam today, but I'm very hopeful I'll be able to join you in person at the future DrupalCon. In the meantime, I wish you all a fantastic conference. And now let's hear from the other panelists. Enjoy the keynote, and thank you very much.

Anthony Bojocan: Mars and its digital ecosystem

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [5:44]

So welcome, Anthony. We are starting off. I think you can introduce yourself, and we wanted to say thank you for coming here to DrupalCon and telling us your story and the story that Mars has.

Anthony Bojocan [6:18]

Thank you very much for the opportunity.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [6:20]

And you will join me afterwards here.

Anthony Bojocan [6:21]

Yes, thank you for directing me where to go. So good morning, DrupalCon. I guess first let me ask a question. How many of you here had had brand managers coming up to you and say, hey, love what you're doing, but I just need to add a paragraph or maybe a button on this component. Why do I need to wait for a 3-week Jira ticket for that in the next sprint? Now, imagine having that conversation in more than 350 websites, with stakeholders across the world, with different cultures, let's say. And today, this is what I'm going to talk about. My name is Anthony Bojocan. I am the Global Web Delivery Senior Lead at Mars. And I'm going to tell the story of first how a big company like Mars faced the reality of this huge enterprise and the complexity of a digital ecosystem. And then second, how Mars transformed our way of building on Drupal without writing a single line of code. Now, to first— to better understand the digital challenge that we have, I think it will help to show you the scale of the portfolio of the company. So Mars is a private family-owned company that started in 1911, discovered by Frank C. Mars in the US. Since then, it has been operating for about 78 markets worldwide with 170,000 associates or employees. It is home to some of the iconic billion-dollar brands. I hope you know some of them. So it's from Pedigree to Royal Canin to Snickers, to M&M's. Fun fact, do you know that M&M's is the most consumed chocolate treat in space? Apparently NASA has chosen this product because of its shell that is avoiding crumbs and leaving melting. Yeah, so the tagline that this brand had before— do you remember what it is? Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Apparently it's true in space as well. So the company has a lot of brands and we have 3 segments. So there is Mars Petcare, where you have your pet nutrition brands like Pedigree, Sheba, Iams. But we also have the growing divisions such as the veterinary health services, and also science and diagnostic. There's also Mars Snacking, so brands like Pringles, Cheez-Its. So these are the brands that was added thanks to the recent acquisition of Kellanova, among others. And then you also have the Mars Food and Nutrition, which is Ben's Original, Dolmio, etc. So my team, I'm from Digital Experience, so we are working under Mars Global Services, and our job is to provide support and function across all of these 3 segments. Now, these 3 segments, they have their own division, own stakeholder. You can imagine it can really be complicated because they have their own priorities as well. So the scale that you see here, it's one of Mars's, like, I would say, greatest strength. But for us, this is also our greatest challenge.

The 2018 GDPR reckoning

**Anthony Bojocan** (continued)

In 2018, as GDPR was enforced, we realized our ecosystem was at significant risk and was preventing digital growth. A lot of you here probably know what GDPR is, I would assume. Maybe some of you live and breathe it depending on what your role is. But at the time, for us, GDPR was not just a regulation. It kind of became like a reckoning because it forced us to face the reality that our ecosystem is at risk. So we had a fragmented brand ecosystem. We needed to connect our digital and content ecosystems to deliver what consumers are looking for across the journey. Our own properties were not connected well to our paid properties, for example. The state of our digital properties were multiplying risks on many dimensions. So for example, at a time, I think we have about, I don't know, more than 10 CMS overlapping. So you can imagine the technical debt that that creates, right? The duplicative technologies that incurs. And it also have impact on our financial, as you can imagine. Because every time we have to create a brand new website, it really has a significant cost to consider. And if we have to do some small changes to remediate the website, sometimes it will cost us more. And I remember during that time, we— there are an agency that we rely on that is costing us or charging us 5 times more than the other agency, and we don't have the power to change that at the moment. Now, finally, of course, the impact of all of those is that we realized we were underserving and underutilizing the power of our world-class brands. So in many markets, brands have no digital presence or own properties because of low ROI or associated costs. So for example, Skittles, it's one of the most— it's one of the known brands in the US. However, they were not investing on their brand site in the UK and China. And you see here that their Tumblr page is not also up to date.

Speaker E (unidentified) [12:23]

Yeah?

Anthony Bojocan [12:24]

So our existing own properties did not live up to creative standards elsewhere. So for example, Dove, we have a very strong TV media presence at a time. However, it did not translate or extend to the brand website, due to lack of integrated storytelling. So as you can imagine, what happened is it left kind of this vacuum in the consumer's omnichannel journey, and it makes it harder for us to reach them. And then finally, I guess a good example I could give is mobile. As you probably know, like more than 60% of our traffic or consumer— of our users are accessing mobile, and I don't probably have to say this, you probably know this as well, is that this poor or low-quality digital experience is actually diluting the singular perception of the consumer to your brand.

Speaker B (unidentified) [13:20]

Yeah?

North Star strategy and the Mars Experience Platform

Anthony Bojocan [13:21]

So, I said so. This was a strong call for action to solve this conundrum. We needed to turn this risk into rewards. So what do we do? So first, we define our North Star strategy. So what it means is we lay out a place for our digital properties into Mars' larger business and digital strategy, right? So it has to complement the bigger picture. Second, we took into consideration the evolving Mars organization and we managed to enable the brands to govern and grow their digital properties. And third, we consolidated our consumer data, ensuring data privacy compliance, marketing automations, operations efficiencies. And because of this, it enables the business to make data-driven decisions on how they want to engage their audience more. And finally, we put in place a modern, best-in-class technology solution that can allow brands to spin up new websites with a very low cost, and this is actually where Drupal came into the picture. So it's about 2020 when we started this journey. So we implemented Drupal internally at Mars. We call it Mars Experience Platform, and we have tremendous success with this transformation program. So by applying the principle compliance by design, we were 100% compliant on our websites. We are operating in more than 54 countries, and I think up until now we have more than 400 properties on the platform itself. And I think one of the most tangible KPI I can show you is that we were able to reduce our TCO by 40%. That is huge. We followed this web accelerator kit approach, right? So we have a good library of components, connectors, and in the end, we were trusted by more than 70 of our global brands at the company. And because of this, we were able to reach more than 250 million of our consumers every year, and we were even recognized externally by our friends from Acquia. I don't know if this is actually the testimony that they have there, but the story I really always share about quickest to launch is that— so there is this brand, Tru Fru. Not sure if you're familiar with the brand. It's like a frozen fruit glazed with chocolate. So it's a— I believe it started in the US. So when the company acquired it, of course, the next step is to sell it on the other countries where the company is present. So when we bring Tru Fru in UK and France, we were able to set up the website in just 2 weeks. That is a record for us. That is very quick. A lot of people were happy. Now, you see that this is really a story from chaos in 2018 to control at scale in 2020. To cutting edge. By the way, when I made this slide, it was just from chaos to control to cutting edge. And I thought, I like it. It looks smart, right? You have 3 Cs, so that's great. But my senior director said, you need to add at scale. And I was like, okay, sure. Let's add another corporate slang. Why not? But he explained the reason why it's actually impactful. And I could be wrong. And I think the reason that he said— and I may be saying this wrong, so Richie, my senior director, if you're watching, comment down below. What he said is that the example that he gave is when we were upgrading CMS. So before, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of cost to do that every time. I think on the first year, we can only do a handful at a time.

Speaker C (unidentified) [17:32]

Right?

Anthony Bojocan [17:33]

But on the next year, we were able to do 100. And then the year after that, we were able to do all the websites on the platform. And it has a very significant cost reduction. We didn't even have to pay extra. It was already included on the operation service that we have from our vendor. And there were very minimal downtime. So that is really the power of scale. And for an enterprise this big, this is the added value of digital technologies to have this kind of support on a big scale.

Strategic priorities: AEO, the agentic web and editorial experience

**Anthony Bojocan** (continued)

Now, for cutting edge, and this is where we are going to talk more about today. So we define our strategic priorities, so for today and the future. So here are 4 of them. The first one is AEO capabilities. Probably no surprise there. So, AEO, we wanted our website to be searchable not only by human but also by search engine. And then by the third audience. I'm going to steal that from Dries. Which are the bots. Second, we want to move forward into the autonomous web. So self-healing, self-automating. And we believe that web agentic is the first step for that. That's why I'm really excited to be in DrupalCon and all of those and attend those topics about Drupal AI. So that's really something I would find inspiring and bring back to Mars. And then third is about global brand archetype. So currently most of the website that we have at Mars is more of local websites. So per brand, per market. So we see a lot of opportunity to transforming that into global brand site. That's why the multilingual functionality is really good for us. It's something we are looking for. And then finally, we are looking for best-in-class editorial experience.

Speaker B (unidentified) [19:29]

Yeah?

Choosing Drupal Canvas

Anthony Bojocan [19:31]

So if we're looking for best-in-class editorial experience, which page builder do we use? So in this first question, we did our due diligence. So we look at what's possible. So we look at what we have. So we have the Sitefactor page layout builder. We look into another one that is a low-cost component-based page builder. And then we look into Drupal Canvas, which I think at the time it's called something else. I think it's like Experience Builder, if I'm not mistaken. And then finally we decided after all of those discussions, so we consulted with our friends from Acquia, with our friends from JAKALA, and among other people to really make sure that we make the right decision. So in the end, we decided to use Drupal Canvas. So for us, there are 2 main differentiators why we went in this direction. The first one is there's no license fee, no hosting dependency, no lock-in of any kind. And then second is it's core native and future ready. So Drupal Canvas is where Drupal's R&D investment is going, right? Does anybody— yes?

Speaker F (unidentified) [20:44]

Yes.

Speaker C (unidentified) [20:45]

Good.

Anthony Bojocan [20:46]

And the AI initiative runs through it. So if you remember in our strategic priority, one of them is about agentic web. So this really fits right in into that, right? So into our overall strategy. That's why we went with Drupal Canvas. I remember last year we already had— we've already made this decision. We went to DrupalCon in Vienna, and we had a meeting with Dries, with some of the people from Acquia as well. We talked about Mars being one of the early adopters of Drupal Canvas. I really appreciate that discussion because it was transparent. It was honest. They talked. They shared with us what could go wrong, right? What are the things we need to anticipate, which is really helpful for us to prepare. But I think for me what's more impactful is that when we made the decision to go with Drupal Canvas, we had a lot of reservation because it's very new at the time. I don't even think it was out officially yet when we decided we want to go with it. So having that meeting with Dries and with other friends from Acquia, it gave us the confidence to say, okay, if something goes wrong, we know we have the attention of the right people that can help us and do something about it. So it really gave us the confidence to move to the next step.

The API Fishcare pilot project

**Anthony Bojocan** (continued)

So we have the layout builder chosen. The next thing missing is what project or what brand do we use it for? And here comes API Fishcare. So probably, I'm not sure if any of you know this brand. So API Fishcare is a Mars brand who is passionate about fish keeping. So its products include treatments, testing, and nutrition for both indoor aquariums and outdoor ponds. So the brand manager last year, her name is Jenny.

Speaker F (unidentified) [22:44]

She's wonderful.

Anthony Bojocan [22:45]

We love working with her. She came up to me saying they have 4 websites that were on a legacy technology. And the Mars security team is on her— is following up on her, let's just say, to do some remediation issue on those websites. So I talked to her, we discussed an approach, and then finally we decided that the best way for her is to move her websites onto the Mars Experience Platform on Drupal. And she agreed that it could be the good MVP for us to try this new solution, Drupal Canvas. So essentially, she agreed to be our guinea pig. So I really am happy about that. So we got up to work, we rolled up our sleeves, and for this one, we partnered with JAKALA. So in about October of last year, we started the UI/UX design of the website. So here, of course, we designed components that is specific to the API Fishcare brand. However, we also want to consider the other brands that could potentially come into the platform. So we look at it in those perspectives. We defined our architecture, of course. So we created a new codebase. We used for the first time Acquia MEO and then of course Drupal Canvas. We have product development. So it runs for 12 weeks. So it's 6 sprints of 2 weeks each. I personally find this very quick because we developed everything from scratch. Yeah. On this experience. So once the components are ready, we went into the assembly phase and then we went to testing. And once testing is finished, we were ready to go live. And on April 2026, the 4 websites of API Fishcare successfully went live. And Jenny was very happy. Yeah, she said that the website looks really cool, really looks fresh and inviting. She was really happy with the collaboration. And yeah, we were celebrating. And as part of this project, we would do a demo with, of course, the Fishcare brand, but also with the other content editors at Mars for the other brands just to validate our assumption that if this is really the right tool to use. So here is a snippet of a demo that I'd like to show you today. If it plays.

Demo: editing a homepage with Drupal Canvas

Speaker F (unidentified, demo video narrator) [25:21]

Charlie, a content editor on the API Fishcare team, has been assigned a task to update the homepage of API Fishcare website. He has little experience with Drupal. He's just had a few demos, and now this is the first attempt at updating a homepage. He just walked in Drupal and spots an edit button on the homepage, so he clicks on it. Here you see the Drupal Canvas editorial experience, but he's still unfamiliar with where to start. Luckily, the Tour module is activated, so we get a quick introduction to how everything works. He can see where components can be added and how to view the different layers of the page he is currently editing. He can also see all the pages that can be edited, the templates that can be updated, and how to preview and review changes. The tour also shows how to edit page metadata such as page titles, SEO metadata, and more. And that's the end of the tour. Now he actually has to add a button on the hero section of the homepage. He clicks on the button and notices a duplicate action, so he clicks on it. The button has now been duplicated. The buttons aren't next to each other, but he remembers the container determines how the components are aligned. He clicks on the container of these elements. He can't remember exactly what to do, but luckily the components tour is here as well. He clicks on it to see more helpful information about how the configuration work. This is exactly what he needs to see: the inline layout that can be changed from here. He clicks on it and the buttons automatically align next to each other. Now they look well aligned, but he would like also to change the text of this button to reference a new product. He would also like to change how the component looks and the type of the button. There are different options for how the buttons can be styled, small or big. Currently, this is something that he really likes. He will keep it as is. Now Charlie clicks Preview to review how the button looks. He can see it in different resolutions: mobile, desktop, and tablet. Everything looks good. Now Charlie can select the homepage for publishing, and Charlie is done with this.

Results: what changed with Drupal Canvas

Anthony Bojocan [27:31]

Well, I don't know about you, but I think that's really impressive. This is really a big difference from where we were before. So what really changed? So for example, in component development, so you know that this activity, it's a multi-step, multi-team workflow, right? So you need a backend developer, frontend developer, a site builder. You need to log a ticket. You need to plan a sprint. You need to— you know what it is.

Speaker B (unidentified) [28:00]

You— Yeah.

Anthony Bojocan [28:01]

You're familiar with that. But with Drupal Canvas, you just need to have a site builder to create this accordion, for example, and assembled this component from 3 base components. No code. And taking it a step further, if you want to enhance an existing component, for example, like adding a paragraph or a button on this one, you just need to have a site builder drag a base paragraph and a button component in there, and that's it. No code. So imagine the velocity that this actually unlocks. It's really amazing. Now, I've been saying nice things about Drupal Canvas in the last like 5 minutes, and I think it would be nice to hear it from other people as well. So here is one of the testimonies that I can share with you today that has really— one of the ones that has like strong impact. So one of the content leads at Mars says that after we did a demo for them, is working with Canvas is like you don't work with Drupal. In fact, it's like you are not working with CMS at all. It feels like working with Figma. And to me, we didn't just give them a new CMS. It's like we give them a creative tool and we empower them. So here's some numbers in terms of KPIs that I can share with you today. So 40% of our component development is faster. Well, there is an 80% less demand for new components required overall. Of course, faster by 30% in website assembly and about 50% TCO reduction, which is really good. And overall increased customer satisfaction. So if you want to hear more about our journey, we have another session later in the afternoon with Boyan from JAKALA with me. So he's my partner in crime during this whole project. So I hope you can see you there later this afternoon. Now, for my closing, I'd like to go back to the brand manager I mentioned about in the beginning, the one that says, I just need to add a paragraph in the bottom of this. Why is it taking a 3-week Jira sprint? This conversation should not be happening anymore. We entirely changed this conversation. So the 3-week Jira sprint is gone. It's been replaced by a 5-minute self-service action with Drupal Canvas. And with that, the brand managers feel empowered. The creative agency has more time to focus on high-value creative. And our developers, who are our most valuable technical resources, are freed from endless cycle of menial tweaks. And because of this, they are also able to focus on building the future of the platform instead of just maintaining the present. Yeah? We were able to bridge the gap for what the business want and what our technology can deliver. And what I would say is because of that, the future of enterprise web isn't about writing more code. It's about empowering more people. And with Drupal, that future is here. Thank you very much.

Conversation with Anthony: why Mars chose Drupal

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [31:44]

Wow, and what a great thing to hear this from you and your team. So it's a little bit— how do you feel about it? It's a little bit— we hear the demos, we see the demos, and suddenly we see it in action. At least I feel really good. So thank you for presenting this, and it cannot be better than having you here and your team later and JAKALA presenting. So I wanted to ask, you talked a little bit about the need, why you wanted, why you chose Drupal, or why Mars chose Drupal. But has this just always been, you just choose Drupal in 2018 and then it's just decided, or how is the process in a large organization like yours?

Anthony Bojocan [32:27]

Yeah, well, actually at the time I wasn't in the role yet. So when I joined the team in 2023, this is one of the questions I asked to my senior director. And the answer that they gave me is that— so they, of course, did the due diligence, of course, doing cost comparative on what is out there, what are available. They already have some ideas on what are the best candidates. But one thing that set aside Drupal is that it's one of the most enterprise-ready open source CMS at the time. And another thing that differentiates it is it has the biggest community.

Speaker E (unidentified) [33:06]

Yeah.

Anthony Bojocan [33:06]

And we really appreciate the contributions, the active contributions of that, and that really set it apart. And actually recently we are doing this another small project where we're comparing Drupal again with another CMS. And for us, it revalidates those reasons we had 5 years ago, 4 years ago, and they are still true until now.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [33:31]

Oh well, that's great. So before going into the next keynote, I wanted to ask you, what's your favorite brand?

Anthony Bojocan [33:38]

I always buy Milky Way. That's my favorite. And the thing is, I don't think it's available in France where I stay, so sometimes it's a bit tricky. But yeah, that's my favorite.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [33:56]

Okay, good. So please join me here on stage because the next keynote, we can talk a little bit more about Drupal afterwards. But now we're going to hear from Charles from World Cancer Day. Tell us how they've been using Drupal and Drupal AI.

Charles Revkin: UICC and its websites

Charles Revkin [34:11]

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you. I must say it's nice to have such friendly faces on stage, but also my comfort animals, Hamish and Miffy. I also brought my notes just to reassure me. But anyway, I'm very grateful to be here to talk to you about a project that means a lot to me and to, I imagine, a lot of other people working on the World Cancer Day campaign and its website. But first, I'd like to ask who in the room has been personally or indirectly affected by cancer? Unfortunately, that is the response that I was expecting. Cancer affects too many of us. So this presentation is not so much about technology, but how we leverage technology to help people share their stories more efficiently while preserving the human at the center. But first, I'd like to just say a few words about where I work, and I also didn't introduce myself. So I'm Charles Revkin. I'm Senior Digital Strategy Manager at the Union for International Cancer Control. It's quite a mouthful, so UICC is easier. And to be honest, I was a bit surprised to see, because I was going to make a joke about how old the organization is, but I was surprised to see that Mars is even older, 1911, but we've been around since 1933, so older than Drupal and the internet itself. And we're a membership organization, so we have over 1,100 members throughout the world, but we are quite a small team. We're based in Geneva, Switzerland, and we're about 45 people. And there's a bunch of acronyms down there, but those are organizations with whom we have official relations. So WHO, World Health Organization, IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, among many others. So we have been using Drupal since I joined the organization and even before. So I joined about 14 years ago, and we were already on Drupal 6, and to be honest, I've always seen the open source communities mirror how UICC works with our members. We all have a great passion and the objective to fight cancer. We have a great global cancer community like you have a great community of developers, and we really try to pool and share our resources in the fight against cancer. So we actually run 4 different websites. So we have uicc.org, our institutional website. We then have worldcancerday.org, which I will talk about more in this talk. We have worldcancercongress.org. So this is a congress that I actually was at helping organize last week in Hong Kong. So I am a bit jet-lagged, so I'll ask BaddĂ˝ to jump in if I forget to say anything important because of that. And finally, we have the International Cancer Control Partnership, which is iccp-portal.org, and that is a global cancer resource website for cancer planners. But I thought I would give you a bit more context about what is World Cancer Day by sharing this short video that introduces the campaign, if it plays.

World Cancer Day campaign video

Speaker F (unidentified, video) [38:20]

Good morning.

Speaker E (unidentified, video) [38:28]

So today I'm seeing my oncologist back in waiting rooms and settings where there's just a lot of tough memories. When people think about cancer, they think of it as a death sentence or a dark cloud constantly over our head.

Speaker C (unidentified, video) [38:46]

But just try to treat every day as a new day, and what happened yesterday is not defining the rest of your days.

Speaker E (unidentified, video) [38:56]

It makes me grateful for every moment of every single day. I love it, I love it, I love it.

Speaker D (unidentified, video) [39:09]

I love it, I love it, I love it.

World Cancer Day: scale and the United by Unique theme

Charles Revkin [39:24]

So I don't know about you guys, but I've seen this video over and over and it gets me every time. So World Cancer Day is a platform for the global cancer community to speak with one voice and raise awareness about cancer. It was created on the 4th of February, 2000. That's why it happens every year on the 4th of February. And UICC, the organization I work for, leads the Global Awareness Health Day, but it is delivered thanks to the invaluable support of our members. So this is just a few figures to kind of give you an idea of the scale of the day. So we had 1,000 registered activities on our map. In 2026, we had over 600 stories shared, which we will talk about a bit more. 382,000+ website visitors, great engagement on social media and in the press, and we have a few names of celebrities and leaders that also marked the day. But what isn't really shown on this slide is the fact that behind these numbers is a small team. So we're a small communications team in a small NGO that is trying to run this campaign. And the other thing that's not really illustrated by these numbers is the fact that most of these numbers are reached within a matter of days. We really get a huge peak in traffic in the days leading up to February 4th. And so it's really compacted into a very short amount of time. So we operate with a 3-year campaign, and for 2025 to 2027, the theme was United by Unique, as you can see also on my hoodie. And it's got a focus on people-centered care. So the theme reflects a simple idea. While millions of people are affected by cancer, every experience is unique. Not 2 experiences are the same. Our shared message brings people together, and the individual stories show the different realities, the emotions and barriers that people face. There is no single cancer experience. Experiences are shaped by where someone lives, their individual circumstances, the support available to them, and their access to care. And you can imagine that people may experience very strong emotions and different emotions throughout this journey, and this is what we wanted to kind of illustrate. And this is the homepage of the website, and you can see these bold emotions that are floating by, and between some of these you can see photos of real people with their real stories. So people-centered care puts people, not the disease, at the center of healthcare, ensuring their needs, their values, and voices guide every decision. And as you may know, we wanted to really raise the issue of people-centered care, and we wanted to do it through storytelling. You know that stories are often more powerful than statistics. Stories create empathy, they demonstrate people-centered care in action, they also can motivate action and advocacy, and another important part is that they help people feel less alone. And on this slide you can see many stories, and just to share the fact that one of them was written by me about my brother-in-law Christophe on the lower right, who unfortunately passed away from cancer at the age of 34. We also had Diego who was supposed to be here with me at 1X, from 1X presenting, at DrupalCon, and he had shared a lovely poem about his mom who went through breast cancer. Fortunately, she's okay. And some of you may recognize also Matthew, who's also in the Drupal community, who also shared his story. But there are many very moving stories that I invite you really to go check. There are sad stories, but also stories full of resilience and hope.

Website features: resources, participation and storytelling

**Charles Revkin** (continued)

So the website is really at the center of the campaign. It's our main means of raising awareness around the day, and it has evolved tremendously over the years that I've worked on it. There are many functionalities, things that people can do on the website, and I would classify them in 3 buckets. The first one is around providing resources. So we built a materials hub where we have multiple resource types like fact sheets, logos, social media content that is available in over 30 languages. We also made the website accessible in at least English, French, and Spanish, so almost entirely translated in those languages. And then we wanted to make it even more accessible, so we have specific pages that are available in even more languages such as Hindi, because we get a lot of people from India who take part in the day, but also Chinese, Arabic, etc. We also wanted to make it easier for users to find the right information faster, so we added a chat tool which initially was powered by our team, our small team, who would answer questions. You wouldn't believe the questions we got. I mean, some of them were very funny. I mean, a common question is, when's the next World Cancer Day, which is 4th of February, just in case you didn't pay attention. And because it took a lot of our time, we then developed AI into that chat, which really efficiently answered a lot of those questions, like the 4th of February question, but it also had the advantage of being able to answer in the user's language. The second bucket is really we want to really get people to participate in the day in any way that they can. And one of the big features is a map of activities. So this map showcases everything that's happening around the world to mark World Cancer Day. And users can add their own activities on there as well, so others can take part if they wish to do so. We also built a custom poster tool, so this allows users to upload their picture, create a personalized poster, and share it on social media. And then, as I said, storytelling takes a very important place in this campaign, and one of the interesting ways that we tried to do this is through a social media challenge called the Upside Down Challenge. And the idea was that we invited people to post their picture on social media upside down to kind of show that cancer can turn someone's world upside down. And it's interesting because it's such a global event. We then had responses from some countries in Asia who said that it's bad form to put someone's picture upside down. So we had to find another way, and so we built an upside-down text tool which turns the text upside down. So if you're really committed, you can do both the photo and the text upside down.

Collecting stories: why an AI chatbot was dropped

**Charles Revkin** (continued)

And then of course a big part of this campaign is through the stories. So we built a story library, and a big part of the work was to find a way to collect these stories. And we started by thinking of bringing AI into the mix because we had had that success with the AI chat tool, and we thought, well, we could build a chatbot that would ask users questions and it would transform that input into a story. But we quickly realized that it was not the right direction. It felt very impersonal. Here we were asking people to share deeply personal stories about their cancer experience, and we really, really wanted to get it right. So, as you know, the challenge was to create a digital experience that allowed the flexibility for the person to share their story in the way that mattered the most to them, sharing the moments that mattered the most to them in their own words. So we had this Drupal AI installed, so instead, we dropped the concept of the Q&A, but we at least used Drupal AI to generate teasers of the story. So here's the card of a story, and the story was summarized and used as a teaser. So we went back to the drawing board thinking of a better way to collect these stories. And so we thought let's just keep it simple. Let's do a simple way using Webform, a multi-step webform. And we wanted to give the user choice, as I said, so they had the option to share a narrative either as a free text or there was guided questions if they didn't know where to start. And there's also the ability to upload artwork. A lot of people express their emotions through art, so that was also added as an option, which was quite popular. And then there was a video option for those who prefer to speak in front of a camera, not me personally. So we had built this feature, and to be honest, I was a bit pessimistic because, as you probably understood, there's many ways that you can take action on World Cancer Day. There's many features for users to engage with. And so I really didn't know how many stories we were going to receive. I was secretly hoping at least 100. But then the 4th of February, 2025 came around and we received over 600 stories. And the problem was that we got them within a very short timeframe. And as I told you, we are quite a small team and we were manually moderating them by hand. And unfortunately this meant that we had a submission— a lag in being able to publish them on time. So a lot of the stories were not published until after the day was over, which is a real shame because people shared their story on World Cancer Day and I think they wanted to see it on the website on that day. So while we were really happy to see how the feature had resonated with our audience, the success had been the problem. We'd built for participation, but we hadn't built for the volume it created.

AI-assisted first-layer moderation with Drupal AI

**Charles Revkin** (continued)

So when 2026 came around, actually a better role for Drupal AI came about, and it was actually a suggestion from the 1xINTERNET team, and they said, why don't we use Drupal AI to provide a first layer moderation to help you deal with this influx of stories? And so they quickly built a proof of concept where basically the AI would categorize the stories in 3 statuses: approved by AI, flagged by AI and rejected by AI. The process was simple. The person's story was shared with the AI LLM, stripping the personal information such as the last name, email that we collected as part of the form. And the AI quickly ascertained whether the story was relevant to a cancer experience, didn't contain any inappropriate content, and went as far also as scanning the images that were also uploaded as part of the story. And as you can imagine, we were quite cautious with the prompts that we gave the AI, because we really wanted to prevent any inappropriate content from being published. But the beauty of the implementation was that the stories that were approved by AI were immediately published. And this allowed us, in the process of the users submitting the form, if the story was approved by AI, they would get this text with, I just shared my story on worldcancerday.org. I invite others to share their story. And it was quite invisible or almost invisible to the user, and made it so much easier for our team as well. And this allowed us really to focus on the stories that needed further attention. So faster publishing with human oversight. And I'm going to tell you a bit more about how it looked in the backend, because this is where I really appreciated the work that the team did and making it easier for the human moderators to review what had happened. So this, as you can see, is the backend on the right. You can see how it looked. And there's a column on the right just before the edit button which shows the moderation reason. And this gave us a quick view of why the AI had taken the decision that it had. And you might see, maybe not in these examples, but there were examples, as I said, there were stories where there was swearing involved. And to be honest, you can completely understand that someone who's going through a cancer experience would want to express a certain type of frustration, anger through swearing. So this was an element that we didn't want to eliminate, but we were reviewing those in particular. I also wanted to show a bit of the preview of the prompt. So it was quite clear what it was meant to do, to analyze the content. And we really wanted, as I said, that this be appropriate, supportive and relevant to the cancer experience. It would flag the mild profanity, as I said, not display personal information, unclear context, etc. But of course, one of the important elements was to reject hate speech, severe profanity, aggressive language, etc. So it was really a lot of tweaking to get this right. And another example is that we really didn't want the stories to contain any treatment methods that were outside evidence-based medicine. And we didn't want the stories to promote a specific drug in particular. I mean, drugs could be mentioned if they were factual and not promotional.

Results, lessons learned and what's next

**Charles Revkin** (continued)

So what changed between 2025 and 2026? So as I said, we had over 600 stories submitted, a lot of them in a matter of days, and this led to a publication lag of days. In 2026, we had 600 more stories, but almost the majority of them were nearly immediately published. There were many more submitted, I must say, but a lot of them unfortunately also had spam or irrelevant content of some people. But thanks to the AI moderation, a lot of that was rejected. And so this really allowed the team to be freed for other elements of the campaign because we were on social media, we're looking at the activities, we're responding to press inquiries, etc. But throughout, the humans were kept in the loop and everything published was in any case reviewed by a human. So I would say that we rejected AI where it weakened the human experience and we used AI where it could really support the human review. So some of our lessons learned. So unfortunately, we kind of started with the technology and not the problem. And we quickly realized that it was not the right solution. And so it was not an easy decision, but we made the decision not to go with collecting stories using the AI chat. But then we had a real problem to fix, and that was the amount of stories that we received. And this is really where the technology helped. And I would say the moderation criteria were constant tweaking. Actually, at some point we realized that some of the stories that were coming through were not relevant to cancer, and we realized that the guided questions had been fed to the AI at the same time, and that's what was tricking it. So that was also a learning point. So I've said this, but I'll reiterate that this is really used for decision support, not decision-making. There was always humans checking what the AI suggested, but this made the process so much easier for all of us. And of course, I have to say we've tried to keep the human in the loop at all steps as possible. And so this is not about measuring— it's about measuring trust, not just efficiency. Because the user had to feel comfortable with the process and that's why we said no to creating an AI chat to collect the stories. And looking ahead, we're so pleased with the success that it has been for the team and for making our lives easier. So we're kind of looking at how we could use AI for moderating the activities. We're also looking at adding the ability to have comments under stories, like messages of support for those who shared their stories openly. And we would implement AI moderation for that. And we're collecting these stories not only for the reasons I said, but we also want to kind of see if there are trends across these stories and hopefully to surface them for some advocacy messaging towards governments on what they can do to improve. And finally, we want to see how semantic search and AI could help with content recommendations, similar stories, et cetera. And I think there have been talks about this, but also looking at accessibility, personalization, and translation support. Last thing I wanted to say is that I've been told— because Baddý has been telling me, you are such a friendly crowd, I want to share a personal thing about me. I've been told that I don't smile a lot in general. And I was preparing this presentation and I was thinking, wow, actually in this instance it's not going to be a problem because it's such a serious topic. But we were really excited about what Drupal AI provided for us, and it made the work of our team so much easier. So that's all. I would invite you to go on worldcancerday.org, read the stories. Some of them are hard to read, but they're very enriching. So thank you. Thank you.

Closing conversation with Charles and Anthony

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:01:22]

Thank you, and thank you to both of you to come here. I know that you are both going to be speaking with your agency partners today, and you're actually doing it today, but your session was cancelled because we promoted it here on the big stage. And I also know, Charles, you've been on Talking Drupal.

Charles Revkin [1:01:39]

Yes, I've been on Talking Drupal and another podcast which I can't remember. That was already some months ago. Yeah, but I've been lucky to be able to share the story of World Cancer Day on those platforms.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:01:54]

Yeah, so I really recommend all of you to connect to him on LinkedIn. He's an extremely good voice for Drupal, is always talking well about Drupal, and going to those podcasts is also great. So thank you for doing that. I know that you came straight from Hong Kong.

Charles Revkin [1:02:09]

Yeah.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:02:10]

And tell me a little bit about— so you are basically doing a similar conference in Hong Kong, like what we are doing here. You're bringing together then the local cancer community?

Charles Revkin [1:02:20]

Yes, well, global, but there's a lot of participation from— so it was in Hong Kong, so of course we had a great participation by Asian participants. And I was actually talking to you this morning and saying that I really enjoyed the passion that the Drupal community brings. And I do see a parallel with the global cancer community that really are passionate about what they are trying to achieve.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:02:48]

So this is DrupalCon number 2 for you?

Charles Revkin [1:02:51]

Yes, I was lucky enough to be invited last year in Vienna.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:02:56]

Yeah, and you also won Splash Awards for the project?

Charles Revkin [1:03:00]

Yes, well, we won— well, 1X and me.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:03:04]

A lot of awards here. That's great, and that was the reason why you came to DrupalCon. Again, here, that's a great opportunity for Drupal to share the stories. So everybody who's here running an agency, bring your clients, submit your cases for the Splash Awards, because if they are nominated, they will come, hopefully, and then next year they'll come again. So I wanted to— you of course told us a lot about the prompt, and I know personally that this prompt is very long and there's a lot of things. How important do you— like, and maybe this goes back to, we started this in 2024, '25.

Charles Revkin [1:03:45]

Yes.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:03:46]

And of course the LLMs or the AI we were using was not as good as it is today. Do you think that it's gonna be— did you feel like that there was a lot of change from the start? And the chatbot, it was just because it could not bring across the taking the personal story and bringing it into a real story. Do you think that we are going to go back to that, to actually try that again now with the technology being better?

Charles Revkin [1:04:16]

I don't think so, to be honest, because it was very jarring to not only me, but the head of communication, and we just felt— well, to be honest, I've seen people interact with the chatbots for direction and the chatbot did a good job, but we just didn't feel right with collecting these stories. And it was a lot about what I said: we wanted people to be able to tell it in their own words and we were afraid that it would hamper that in some way. So it's more around that I feel that we wouldn't necessarily consider it. But who knows? I don't—

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:05:08]

Yeah, and I think it is great. I encourage you all to go there, share your story, of course. We talked a lot about how it's sometimes hard for people to share a story because you sometimes don't own the story yourself. Because maybe something happened to a family member, and you don't feel empowered to tell that story. And I think like Charles is always saying to us and me that please share the story, and the story is still yours. It's your experience, so it doesn't have to be about the person that we are maybe writing about. It is about the story, how you lived it.

Charles Revkin [1:05:41]

It is true. But when I did share the story of my brother-in-law, I did ask my sister how she felt about it, and she was happy for me to share it. So I think it's also important to— if you feel that's a necessary step, it's completely understandable.

BaddĂ˝ Sonja Breidert [1:05:59]

All right, so thank you, Anthony and Charles, for sharing your stories. Please tell more on the internet. I think there was an invitation note yesterday. Please share all of these stories online as much as you can. And all of you, please repost this when we see it. So thank you both, and thank you for coming so early in the morning.

Charles Revkin [1:06:24]

Thank you.

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