Toolkit Digitalisierung – Setting Up an Activist’s Database for Success

GIZ or Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit is an international NGO giant responsible for carrying out many social projects and operates in over 120 countries across the globe. They’re owned by the German Federal Government and approached us for help with making sure their knowledge database continues to improve the work of social workers across the globe.

GIZ introduced the need for a unified platform that consolidates the knowledge and various digital tools required to carry out these projects. Toolkit Digitalisierung should become the platform where grassroots actors could easily access and draw best practices for how to kickstart their organisation.

Building Infrastructure and Content to Facilitate Organisational Growth

By the time it came to developing the Toolkit Digitalisierung, Bleech had already collaborated with the GIZ through its creative agency partner, Studio Good. As a result, we were invited to get involved in a number of other projects, which has allowed us to gel with the organization members as a team.

During the development of the project’s goals, it became clear that for our partner, it was essential for us to handle the technical aspect of the projects and ensure that complex operations were carried out smoothly in the backend. We also realized that the primary challenge in creating the Toolkit lay within the fact that there was an absence of collected content and content structure in the working space.

Restructuring the website

Through consistent meetings the need for a complete restructure of the website arose, which, although a challenging prospect, was also an exciting opportunity.

One of the major issues that we fixed with the restructuring of the website is that of data collection and linking. By packaging the brand as a family, we were able to extend individual projects as branches of the main website as the organization introduced new ones with time. The skeleton of the website structure remained the same, but the outlook and appearance were modified to align with the project theme, making the platform feel dynamic and unique.

Avoiding Problems Further Down the Line with a URL Structure Consultation

We always encourage our clients to think deeply about their expectations of their websites and raise them with us during the consultation and the project check-ins. This allows us to fully understand what their priorities and concerns for their upcoming website are. However, the benefit of these discussions does not only lie in what the project manager can design and execute for you successfully. Often time, it simply allows us to understand where you want to go with your website and offer even better solutions to get there.

For instance, GIZ expressed their wish to modify their URL structure. While we could understand their desire from an organizational point of view, our experience in developing WordPress websites told us that this approach was outdated and would only introduce limitations in the future as the change would be irreversible. As such, we took this opportunity to encourage Toolkit Digitalisierung to view their project from a wider perspective and avoid URL restructuring at this point. Instead, we helped them understand and implement a more efficient and focused way to perform URL structuring where future changes don’t need to be made in the main database but rather the official URL structure only.

Best of Both Worlds – Collaboration Breeds Solutions

The key to making a collaboration like this work is communication. It would be easy to let contact dwindle out, considering the sheer scale of GIZ’s organization and the scope of their projects. With over ten years of experience in helping clients of all sizes and industries succeed, our experts have made sure to involve the stakeholders at Toolkit Digitalisierung in every critical step, as it goes a long way in establishing and maintaining a long-term professional relationship between our partners and us.