Teach For America and the COPE Machine

Teach For America works in partnership with communities to expand educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty. Founded in 1990, Teach For America recruits and develops a diverse corps of outstanding individuals of all academic disciplines to commit two years to teach in high-need schools and become lifelong leaders in the movement to end educational inequity. Today, more than 10,000 corps members are teaching in 52 urban and rural regions across the country, while nearly 28,000 alumni work across sectors to ensure that all children have access to an excellent education.

Our website is a key lever for organizational goals, but it was struggling to meet the needs of our end users, authors, and even developers:

• Regions and departments built over 1,000 of their own unmoderated websites
• Inconsistency of visual brand across websites
• Autonomy and governance issues around content and ownership
• A cumbersome clumsy authoring experience
• A single Drupal developer managing and developing the site

Join us as we share the year long journey from idea to complete site overhaul:

• Creating the foundation for content sharing via the COPE model (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) to position our team as a content powerhouse; revitalizing the content authoring experience and focusing on the end user
• Developing and enforcing consistent digital brand guidelines
• Investing and building investment in the product among senior leaders
• Scaling a team from 1 to 7, integrating with 3 different vendors, and collaborating with IT to develop Single Sign On (CAS)
• Developing and implementing a multisite environment to meet the needs of our 52 regions