And the 2021 Acquia Engage Award goes to…

There’s been plenty of excitement at Manifesto this week since we found out that we’ve won a 2021 Acquia Engage Award in the Leader of the Pack – NGO category. 

These awards recognise the high-impact digital experiences that global organisations are building using the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which includes Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud.

The winner of each category at the Acquia Engage Awards had to demonstrate an advanced level of functionality, integration, performance and user experience in a project for an external client or partner. While we were extremely proud of the work that we had created, it’s still been a thrill to find out that the judges agreed it should be recognised.

Award winning work

Manifesto’s award-winning entry is Lessons from Auschwitz Online – an immersive online learning experience for the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). This charity was formed in 1988 to remind students of the faces and lives lost behind the unimaginable facts and figures of the Holocaust. Since HET had always used face-to-face sessions, the social distancing caused by the Covid-19 pandemic created an urgent need for an online experience with a suitably personal approach that could reach out to younger generations even during lockdown. That’s the point at which they looked to us for help.

Our approach

HET partnered with Manifesto to digitally transform its 40-year-old, face-to-face education course. We agreed to work alongside HET’s in-house team, rather than parachute in as an outside contractor, so that the charity’s employees would be involved in the project from the very start. Thanks to this approach, once the build process was complete and we stepped back, the HET staff knew the system inside and out because they’d been there every step of the way.

While the digital learning platform is interactive, engaging and accessible, it was vital to retain the human aspects that had been central to HET’s previous face-to-face approach. As an online educational course, this profound insight into a dark period of human history is also available to a far wider global audience.

Working with Acquia

Our team followed many of the Acquia Cloud performance recommendations to prevent speed and caching issues, which are vital to maintaining an accessible and user-friendly platform during peak times. By partnering with Acquia we could also install multi-sites, which allowed us to have separate sites for the learning tool and registration, while retaining look, feel and usability.

Key to the success of the online learning platform, Acqiua also supports the installation of Drupal distributions such as Opigno, a learning management tool which we used as the base of the HET site.

Pushing boundaries

Our MD, Rebecca Hull, is naturally delighted that the Acquia Engage Awards have recognised such outstanding work. “Our team members are proud to have pushed the boundaries of an online learning experience so that the core messages have been lifted beyond the confines of a laptop screen,” she says “One of the digital platform’s greatest successes is the way that it has so effectively extended the reach and influence of this charity and their important message.”

Many of this year’s Engage Award winners have collaborated with one of more than 600 Acquia preferred partners. We’re very happy to be one of these! Manifesto became an Acquia Preferred Partner back in 2017, and now Gold Partners, we have access to Acquia Solution Architects and Technical Account Managers who can assist with recommendations of the best managed Drupal hosting packages, based on the needs of our client.

Find out more about Manifesto’s Drupal services.

Learn more about the award-winning Lessons from Auschwitz Online experience from HET here.