The Client 

Each year, the Feeding America network provides food to more than 37 million low-income people facing hunger in the United States, including 14 million children and nearly 3 million seniors. Their network of more than 200 food banks serves all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, securing and distributing more than 2.5 billion pounds of food and grocery products annually.

The Challenges 

With each of these food banks across the country having their own website operation, maintaining some level of consistency, brand control and web strategy had become extremely difficult. The goal was to provide each food bank with a web presence consistent with the Feeding America identity and an intuitive means of making frequent updates. At the same time, meet the needs of the food banks to be able to have some level of distinct branding and design as well as administrative control.

The Solutions

Roundedcube implemented Sitecore Foundry - a CMS solution specifically for multi-site management and distribution. The solution is well-suited for organizations that have a need to distribute branded websites to a variety of affiliated groups or organizations, while providing guidance and structure to those sites. Multiple design templates were developed so that any food bank migrating into the new solution can have a selection of layout and design that suits their marketing and content needs best. Also, within each site template, the color palette was made to be customizable to allow each food bank to apply their own identity's color guidelines. The Sitecore Page Editor interface was also enabled to allow food bank content editors to simply browse the site and make content changes inline - a very intuitive process for even most novice website author. Meanwhile, Feeding America "corporate" content such as the description of the organization is fed into the food bank sites giving the organization a guaranteed level of consistency.

The Results

Training and orientation materials were developed to aid in the continual migration of food bank websites once the system was launched. Since then, Feeding America and it's Food Bank Network has been able to launch completely new websites all hosted within this one content management system and more and more of the 200 food banks are migrating over.