PATH.org: A Wordpress to Wagtail migration story for a leader in global health
Tom Furtwangler from PATH spent some time with us sharing how his organization transitioned from Wordpress to Wagtail
Meet Tom Furtwangler, Senior Technology and Operations Manager at PATH, a nonprofit global health organization, and one of America's Top 100 Charities. We spoke with Tom about why PATH switched to Wagtail CMS and how they are using their new website to pursue their mission of making good health more accessible for everyone, everywhere.
What are your main website objectives?
Our website serves two main functions. As a leader in the field of global health, it serves as a knowledge bank for our colleagues and partners, with resources like training curricula, research reports, case studies, articles, and other technical outputs. Those pages and documents also provide a lens through which potential partners and major funders can assess whether we are a good fit for a particular project or initiative.
It's also where we solicit individual donations, a critical source of funding for our work. Articles about our programs and impact, and profiles of our leaders and key scientists, provide a way for donors to stay connected and understand the lifesaving impact of their support.
What did your legacy set-up look like?
Before we moved to Wagtail in 2018, we were running a large website that had grown organically over time. Parts of it were built on a home-grown CMS, parts of it were on a WordPress multisite, and our blog was on a separate instance of WordPress.
We wanted to bring our site into a modern, cohesive content management system, and move to an efficient contributor model with several tiers of editor roles and permissions. A critical need was to more efficiently manage and delegate who could create or edit various kinds of content across the site.
Why did you pick Wagtail CMS?
We worked with an agency in Portland, Oregon called Instrument to explore what was out there; we looked at a lot of CMS options. Eventually, we settled on Wagtail, which seemed to be a well-supported and powerful content management system that met all of our needs and was backed by a great community.
We went on to build a beautiful and stable new site with Instrument, which launched in the summer of 2018, and we’ve found that Wagtail provides a great editorial experience for our staff.
Once the site was built and launched, we parted with Instrument – on very good terms! – and started working with Torchbox, who maintain the site, collaborate with us to add new features over time, and provide a full suite of managed hosting and application support.
How does Wagtail integrate with your other key tools and systems?
Torchbox has helped us integrate our Wagtail site with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Together, these systems give us a broader visibility into how individuals are navigating through our site and our digital content. This means we can build much more sophisticated journeys that serve users the content they’re looking for in a much more effective way.
Our integrations also allow visitors to subscribe to specific, topical newsletters across PATH programs like vaccines, women's reproductive health, and early childhood development.
What projects are in flight for PATH?
We are midway through a large localization project with Torchbox and plan to make the site available in French, Vietnamese and Portuguese. We're currently in the process of prioritizing which parts of the site are going to be translated into which languages, and in what order. We're hopeful that the site will go live in French in 2025.
We’ve also recently worked with Torchbox on a major revamp of our main menu categories and top-level navigation, to improve user experience. This information architecture (IA) revamp was informed by insights Torchbox helped us develop from site audits and visitor data, user research including tree testing and card sorting exercises, and suggestions from their broad experience with similar sites.
We’re also encouraging individual PATH programs to use Wagtail when they need to build microsites. In the past, our microsites were kind of a free-for-all, but standardizing on Wagtail makes training and support—and security—much easier.
What’s next for PATH?
Like all organizations, we’re beginning to grapple with how new and emerging AI technologies will integrate into our site and what that will mean for people who are searching for us on Google and elsewhere.
We’re also planning to deliver increasingly personalized digital experiences for our audiences. For starters, this might look like recognizing where visitors are in the world, and their preferred language. Eventually, with the connection to Salesforce, we may know if they are part of a group of users who have shown more interest in a particular topic, like our malaria work or vaccine work, and begin to serve them more relevant, contextual and personalised content.
Not only will this create a better user experience, but it will get our global health resources in front of those audiences that can use it for greater impact in the world.
