Project : Ireland Reaching Out

Client : Ireland Reaching Out

The Brief

We were approached by Michael Feerick, who is a web entrepreneur based in Loughrea Galway, about realizing a vision he had. He had been working on a concept for many years which he believed would help regenerate communities around Ireland and also reconnect much of the Irish diaspora with their national heritage. The concept had picked up momentum in the weeks before to talking to us as he had been joined on his mission by the Journalist David McWilliams, who had come across the project after the famous "Farmleigh Project". The concept was to allow small communities in Ireland to contact the diaspora around the world who have connections with these exact communities. By creating a sense of connection with the communities people are encouraged to visit them, and to strenghten the relationship for the future. Our challenge was to build the social networking site that would make this possible in its first test phase, and create the brand that this would be launched under.

Our Thinking

The Ireland Reaching Out incentive focused on communities, so a social network with groups for each community group was a natural fit. We new that there was a wealth of information within the communities and that this would drive the initial phase of this project, so the users who were going to be capturing and uploading content needed to be treated with high priority. A lot of these people would also not be digital natives, so the interface needed to be very intuitive and helpful to those people in particular. While there was a huge task to get very large amounts of data into this system in a short space of time we also needed to monitor and control the standard and verify it. One data entry pitfall that we were very conscious of was the duplication of content.

What we did

To begin with we designed the Ireland Reaching out logo. We wanted something had a subtle hint of the old country to it (ignoring the fact that it was pretty much the word "Ireland"), but also had a web savvy feel to it. The heavy greens were used to feel a bit traditional, and the rounded corners on the X and the simplicity of the O gave it that modern web feel. The system was built using Drupal 6 and a collection of custom modules that we created ourselves. The organic groups feature was used to make the Parish communities a core feature, and an auto-complete search feature was used during the data creation phase to avoid the problem of data duplication.

Results

Since the launch of the site in its test phase, and extended family of 200 people have arranged to come and visit Loughrea in Galway. The Irish Tourist board estimates that each tourist in Ireland spends €2000 on average, which is worth an estimated €400,000 for this small Parish in east Galway.

Technology

This project was built using the following technologies