A multisite with over 500 subsites – Scouterna’s new platform offers Sweden’s many scout groups the opportunity to continue encouraging friendship, team spirit and adventure for children and young people. We’re thrilled to have been involved in this work.
Triggerfish and Scouterna have been working together for many years now. We had been responsible for their websites previously, and in 2018 were given the exciting and sizable job of developing a new platform for all the organisation’s scout groups. The result was a multisite with over 600 subsites, which now serve over 70,000 members and local clubs.
The Guides and Scouts of Sweden offer children and young people from all areas of society the chance to experience adventure together, and to grow as individuals. This means that every day they contribute to an inclusive society characterised by diversity and respect, something that is more relevant now than ever.
With this important knowledge in mind, the scout group websites needed to be consistent, informative and inspirational hubs for all of Sweden’s scout groups. By creating a hierarchy in the multisite, the local groups can now access news, calendar events, social media flows and info about vacancies and sponsors – all direct from national and district level. It provides a more vibrant and attractive experience for visitors, while streamlining the work of local administrators. So that the groups don’t have to deal with new log-in details and authorisation issues, we integrated Scouterna’s membership register into the new solution.
We created simpler WordPress themes for the jamboree.se and ungtledarskap.se (young leadership) websites, which present each activity in a simple and clear way. For other websites, it was more a matter of taking over administration of existing installations and being responsible for support and further development.
The scout group websites were preceded by a lengthy preliminary study, during which we worked with Scouterna to find out more about the needs and requirements across the country. Scouterna sent out surveys and interviewed various groups, while we gathered information from Scouterna’s national head office, IT managers and volunteers in introductory workshops with constructive discussions.
The challenge was to find a level that made the site functional and flexible for the groups, while remaining compatible with Scouterna’s guidelines and simple to administrate. Furthermore, we needed to move as much material as possible from existing websites. We therefore customised agile import and export functions.
Publishing over 500 websites takes time. Initially we helped with a script developed in house that pushed out around 150 sites in one go. The remaining sites have since been launched according to Scouterna’s own schedule. When they feel happy with the content, they have been able to launch one site at a time with just a few simple clicks, using a launch function developed by us.
It’s an honour working with Scouterna. So we’re delighted that we are continuing to manage and enhance all of Scouterna’s websites.
We chose Triggerfish because we can see they have the WordPress expertise that we’re looking for, and we were impressed by their know-how and experience.
