On a mission to move the needle of public education in the United States, from a highly regulated system to one that motivates schools to offer more creative and performance-based teaching, CSDC has excelled at providing easy to access resources to the charter school reform movement in California and all over the world.
Executive Summary:
Making It Happen.
Understanding the ins and outs of CSDC’s mission, we have worked together to build a full online experience for the charter school community. We put our client in control of their technology, wrote integrations with legacy platforms, and built a 100% custom functionality where innovation was required.
The Challenge: National and International Assistance
Although CSDC’s mission begins with California, their goal is to be available nationally and internationally. With the charter school movement growing, the need to build an online presence became imperative to their mission. They started by building an online site to publish informational updates about the charter school movement. As the CSDC community found its niche and continued to grow, the site started to add more content modules. Most importantly, their annual membership program.
The Solution: A Fully-Fledge Online Portal
Understanding the ins and outs of CSDC’s mission, we have worked together to build a top-notch online experience for the charter school community. We have helped the company carry out a custom integration with Salesforce, implemented and adapted a custom content handler, and built a new page for their Governance Academy initiative.
The Impact:
Their commitment to advocating for charter schools has extended internationally, providing a network of support and services Users are actively looking for. Their online experience has reached over 350 charter schools who have signed on to their online membership and contributed to the personalization of their site experience.
After the Charter School Act of 1992 was passed in the United States, the Charter School Development Center (CSDC) was founded. With the idea to continue advocating for the national charter school movement, Executive Director and Founder, Eric Premack helped to draft policies and funding in California.
Overtime, CSDC became has become an important advocate in California’s charter arena, providing renowned leadership training and important informational updates that support the activities of all California charter schools. Today, the company has grown into a unique online site filled with important resources for members and non-members of the California charter schools - including ongoing operational support and access to unique content curated and posted on chartercenter.org.
CSDC's unique content required maintaining a user-friendly look and feel that made the material easy to access, reference, and even download from their site to all membership holders. As the CSDC community found its niche and continued to grow, the site started to add more content modules. Most importantly, their annual membership program. Through this new online portal charter schools, management organizations, vendors, and consultants among others, should have access to a network of information. At the same time, CSDC needed to create an online solution to help support their ongoing services.
We have built, organized, and optimized a library of online content for CSDS, focusing on creating web pages that are consistent with their brand identity. At the same time, the valuable network of CSDCs membership program, called for custom integration with the salesforce CRM, to provide a central database to distinguish members and non-members, to detonate important and timely messaging, and most of all connect with their online community. Our top goal has been to provide CSDC with the flexibility to establish their leadership online, without an overly-engineered solution.
We used Active Admin and integrated it with the Ruby on Rails back-end. This efficient approach avoids double entry and results in greater consistency. Content and access come from Rails and the administrator was now able to edit content without having to deal with code. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor allows for webmasters and content created to easily upload, edit and deploy new content on the page.
CSDC has worked with Resolve Digital from day one to build, maintain and optimize their online site experience. Building both the front and back end of their website with us has allowed them to maintain the flexibility to edit content quickly and keep up with regulatory demands for the organization. As its mission has scaled, Resolve Digital has been a key partner in adding online training programs, effective resources, and certifications.
