A Powerful Platform to Advance Cleft Care for Children Across the World

Headquartered in New York City, Smile Train is a nonprofit organization and charity providing corrective surgery for children with cleft lips and palates. Smile Train provides free corrective cleft surgery in 87 countries, training local doctors and providing hospital funding for the procedures. 

We helped Smile Train develop a faster, more unified, and mobile optimized platform for donors, doctors, supporters, patients and families to easily find resources or paths to involvement. Smile Train’s team could create and manage content quicker than ever following the platform’s launch. 

At a glance

Incorporating Smile Train’s vision into any strategic decisions was critical. The new platform needed a governance and architecture model to influence future sites and make content management much easier for their team. 
 

They sought our help to revamp their flagship site as a cornerstone to a new, unified, mobile-optimized, and global Drupal platform where all their audiences could become involved. This created an even greater need for Smile Train’s site to be mobile-friendly and accessible. 

Our discovery process with Smile Train was thorough and inclusive for their team. This allowed us to deeply understand the project objectives and how to keep Smile Train’s cleft-focused vision and their audiences at the forefront throughout the strategy. 

Our workshops around personas and information architecture provided valuable insights around who Smile Train’s five key audiences are and how to best message them. 

This information laid the groundwork for grouping content and creating a sitemap to help users more easily find and identify content that fits their needs. 

Smile Train’s site was made faster, more responsive, and simplified for users and content editors alike, yet also more robust. 

It laid the foundation of continuous improvements for Smile Train’s platform for years to come that can extend to all international sites. 
More than a dozen components—such as galleries, cards, tabs, and listings—were implemented to allow editors to remix key pages with less friction. 

Content was localized to allow Smile Train users in different regions to get relevant content in their language. Using best practices, our developers configured the site to reduce the friction of deploying or changing features on a per-site basis. 

With multiple sites, using common code allowed regional sites to share code and make distributed updates fast and reliable.