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www.socialeeconomie.be

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Targeted selection of social economy-related organisations, services and products via the new Drupal portal site

• Integration and synchronisation of legacy CiviCRM databases in Drupal 6
• Performing geolocation
• Extensive cross-linking resulting from the intensive use of taxonomy
• Automated and transparent integration of the same information at other sites, including www.provant.be (Province of Antwerp)

Brussels, 22 January 2009 - Connexion Corporate Communications NV, the borderless information designers and leading integrators of Web Content Management Systems, today announced that they have completely revamped the www.socialeeconomie.be portal site using Drupal CMS at the request of Vosec vzw. Vosec is a consultation platform for companies, organisations and experts involved in the social economy in Brussels and Flanders.

The new portal site is designed to provide an easy method of locating and identifying all social economy-related stakeholders, products and services, details of which are processed and constantly updated in a CiviCRM environment. This approach opens new doors to the many advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organisations that currently use CiviCRM to administer their relationships with members and target groups.

Straightforward pinpointing of social economy organisations
It is now far easier to locate information about social economy matters in Flanders. Visitors to the new portal site can search by company, product or service. Refined search requests by sector and sub-sector are also available.
Visitors who prefer the geographical approach can select the province they are interested in via a streamlined map. They will then see a detailed map and can click on the municipality of their choice. All social economy organisations in the selected area will then be pinpointed on a Google map and appear in a clickable bullet list. The same result can be obtained by entering a zip code.
 

Powerful use of taxonomy
Taxonomy is becoming increasingly popular with administrators of dynamic web environments. The Drupal content management system has particularly strong taxonomy features. In the case of www.socialeeconomie.be, information structure that is not present in the CiviCRM database has been added to the website using taxonomy. As a result, Vosec is able to offer extra data segmentation at their site (such as hierarchical sorting), meaning that visitors obtain dynamically customised information on-screen.
 

Sharing CRM data with other sites
The Province of Antwerp’s www.provant.be website is the first site of its kind automatically to show – using its specific look and feel – the local social economy data that Vosec manages centrally using CiviCRM. This way, the data is only created once and always remains up to date. The websites of other Belgian provinces can also benefit from the same rationalisation process.

These advances have been made possible by the fact that the Drupal CMS fully separates content from the graphic environment, allowing the same information to be shown in a completely different way. In this particular case, a selection of the CRM data managed by Vosec has been put into a separate Drupal graphics theme based on style sheets from the provant.be website (see 
http://www.provant.be/ondernemen/sociale_economie/catalogus/). The main features, such as searching by company, product and service, have of course also been included. And because all page elements on the provincial website – such as the menu – are integrated dynamically, manual intervention is not needed at all.

 “This new portal site illustrates just how far you can go when integrating the contact database CiviCRM with Drupal,” says Geert Jespers, Communications Manager at Vosec. “This is a real plus for us, as we can continue to manage all data in our  familiar CiviCRM environment, while the same information is also shown at our  own portal site, as well as at a number of other public sector websites. This is also good news for whoever is looking for a stronger collaboration between CiviCRM and Drupal and aiming this way at more flexibility.”
 

About Connexion Corporate Communications SA
Connexion Corporate Communications is a Belgian business-to-business communications and language agency, and WCMS integrator.  As Borderless Information Designers, Connexion has been operating on the international market since 1987. The agency has built up expertise over a number of years with various content management systems, in particular Hot Banana and Drupal. Connexion Corporate Communications clients using the agency’s online and offline borderless information expertise include Ansell Healthcare, Atos Worldline, Belgacom, Cognos, Electrabel, Ingersoll Rand, ISFE, Nuance, Keurslager, Isabel, Tractebel and Vosec.

For more information about Drupal or Connexion Corporate Communications, visit www.connexion.eu or call Stany van Gelder on +32 (0)2 421 71 40.