Our partnership with Amnesty International (the International Secretariat) dates back to 2018, and the creation of a core WordPress theme which allowed the organisation to create multiple pages, microsites and websites quickly and efficiently. As part of that initial project, we provided support in launching the first site in November 2018, replacing Amnesty International European Institutions Office.
In early 2019 we launched the core WordPress Gutenberg theme, allowing the internal teams at Amnesty to produce new sites for national offices, sections and specific audiences at the IS (such as niche subjects or additional languages). Puerto Rico, Mali, Indonesia, and Amnesty.eu all launched as a result.
We worked with WordPress to provide Amnesty with the tools to create multiple sites for their various campaigns, sections and regional offices across the world. Fast forward to February 2020, and we were thrilled to be given the opportunity to work on the rebuild of the organisation’s central site Amnesty.org.
On this project, we’ll rebuild the .org site using the Amnesty WordPress Theme, while keeping the design and styling as close to the current site as possible.
The main aims of the project;
- To rebuild the existing features and functionality of Amnesty.org in WordPress, building upon an existing branded starter theme.
- Translate Amnesty’s requirements, specifications and designs into high-quality solutions that support its organisational objectives.
- Completely rebuild the website back-end in WordPress, including built-in support for multiple languages.
- Carry out the content migration to WordPress.
Amnesty International is a global movement of more than seven million people who take injustice personally. They campaign for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. Amnesty International campaigns for a world where all enjoy human rights, this is done by investigating and exposing the facts, whenever and wherever abuses happen. They lobby governments and other influential groups, making sure they keep their promises and respect international law. Over the past fifty years, Amnesty has been through a significant transformation, adapting to dramatic changes in the world. Having expanded from their London base, to open regional offices in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
These regional offices, national offices and sections help strengthen the work, investigations, campaigns and communications that Amnesty undertakes. These regional hubs can respond quickly with local sections and national offices to local events wherever they happen, creating a powerful force for freedom and justice.
We built Amnesty’s WordPress Theme as part of Benenson, and as WordPress has evolved over the past five years, Amnesty.org is now evolving with it.
Utilising WordPress across the suite of Amnesty websites has allowed their team to solve problems by providing solutions for consistent branding and codebase, average site cost reduction and reducing duplication of work across different workflows and prioritisation of best practice.
Having Amnesty.org on the Amnesty WordPress Theme will allow the organisation to add new functionality regularly to the many other theme users, and experience a much faster process for putting new content live, with WordPress’s user-friendly Gutenberg editor.
To date, we are twenty four weeks into the project, and we’ve held numerous planning and discovery sessions, tidied up the existing theme, and got some essential maintenance out the way. We have also launched several new features which all existing theme users are already able to benefit from.
It’s always been and continues to be a pleasure to work with the Amnesty team. We continue with our weekly planning sessions, and we recently added additional resource to the project to continue new feature launches and accelerate the significant block development work.
