The Amnesty International Report (AIR) is the organisation’s highest profile publication each year, generating global interest in Amnesty International, its work and aims. The annual AIR showcases the important work the movement does in promoting internationally recognised human rights for all and represents the varied and global nature of Amnesty’s reach.
Website
Background
Solid State Group was initially commissioned in 2007 by Amnesty International to produce the Amnesty International Report (AIR) micro site and have been involved in each annual report released since then.
The annual report not only included all of the information, features and material in the printed report itself but also housed added value content such as video clips, calls to action and user registrations. Visitors to the site needed to be encouraged to delve deep into the report and also join, donate and support active campaigns. Although branded a micro site, the Amnesty International Report hosts a higher volume of content than Amnesty International’s main site and is also multilingual with six languages including the Arabic layout reading right to left.
Strategic Objectives
- To showcase Amnesty International as a strong, modern, global campaigning organization
- To capitalize on the intense media interest surrounding the launch
- To present the Amnesty International Report in an easily accessible and highly readable format
- To stir individuals, organizations and governments into action
Solution
The website was created on the Cookie Jar CMS for 2007 and 2008, however because of a organisation wide move to use open source software in 2009 Amnesty requested Solid State Group to design the site to be implemented on Drupal. Because the information for the report comes from many different sources worldwide the report is imported into the site in multiple formats and languages.
The report consisted of more than 300 pages of text, which were initially produced in five languages - English, Spanish, French, Russian and Arabic, then later modified to also include Portuguese. Cookie Jar’s multilingual capability provided allocation of all content including text, images and video by language enabling easy site replication and content management by language.
Content was imported into Cookie Jar from 6 different formats – InDesign, Word, PDF, Quark, text files and Excel. Solid State Group wrote a content import module that imported from all of these formats, stripping unnecessary styles and loading consistent content into the CMS. This saved vast amounts of time over manually entering all 300 pages of text.
For the first time in it’s history, the AIR introduced web 2.0 methodologies, using social-networking elements like ‘Add your voice’ and blogs, in order to make the site more usable and accessible to readers.
As the Amnesty International Report is published worldwide and followed by millions it was important that the site could handle extreme amounts of traffic. Solid State Group deployed the website load balanced across two servers and the Akamai content network enabled it to handle the three to four million pages served per day on average. After going live the site experienced a traffic spike of over seven million pages in a day with no adverse affects.
Results
Solid State Group enabled Amnesty International to quickly author a digital version of its annual report and publish it to millions of people worldwide in a variety of different languages almost instantaneously. The website has enabled the charity to highlight that the world is in the middle of a human rights crisis, which influences its readers, often key politicians and global decision makers to work towards improvement that helps billions that are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity around the world.
“Solid State Group delivered a fresh, modern micro site for Amnesty International and one that reflects our stance as a progressive campaigning force,” said Kieran Wyatt, project manager for the Amnesty International Report 2007 website. “Solid State Group worked closely with us every step of the way during the design, build, test and launch stages, putting in many extra hours of work to ensure the site was delivered on time to our specifications. It was a complex launch – the five languages notwithstanding – and a project that had to be steered through a complicated approvals process. SSG proved more than capable for the task and we’re extremely pleased with the end result.”
Kieran Wyatt, Project Manager
About Solid State Group
Solid State Group is a web platform software vendor and technical agency. The company specialises in solutions for managing web content and digital assets as well as social networking. Our products enable the rapid development of web sites and applications on proven and stable architecture. We also develop bespoke web applications from scratch and offer a full service solution including strategy, design, usability, SEO, and integration into third party systems.
The company has developed over 100 web projects since 2002 and complexity ranges from simple brochure websites to complex social networks, intranets, payment processing portals and eBay style ecommerce sites.
Our client list consists of blue-chip, public sector, SME and not for profit organisations. Blue chip clients include Shell, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony, Yahoo! and Ericsson. Other clients include NHS, Amnesty International, Brit Awards, Odeon and i-level. For more information please visit www.solidstategroup.com or call +44 (0) 207 613 7220.
