By Janus Boye
Genc Kastrati is Web Team Lead at The Global Fund in Geneva and gave us a look behind the scenes of how they use Umbraco to manage their multilingual website
Selecting the right CMS has never been easy and the marketplace remains confusing, crowded and full of new buzzwords.
At the same time, selecting the right one has probably never been more important with increasing demands and expectations both internally and externally. A good website and a good digital platform to power it five years ago doesn’t necessarily cut it in 2024. Many organisations have found themselves with massive technical debt and forced to migrate to another solution.
In a recent member’s call we heard an interesting non-profit case study from Web Team Lead Genc Kastrati at The Global Fund in Geneva. They’ve been using commercial open source CMS Umbraco to power their multilingual website for over seven years and are quite happy with it.
The Global Fund is a Geneva-based worldwide movement to defeat HIV, TB and malaria and ensure a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all. Let’s start with a big picture of the Umbraco setup at The Global Fund.
The big picture: Umbraco at The Global Fund
The Global Fund invests over five billion dollars annually and uses its website as a crucial tool for informing the general audience and donors, as well as providing essential resources for countries to carry out their grant implementation work.
The Global Fund’s website is crucial for the organisation. Notice the funding and grant-making at the top, as well as website search and language picker. If you look beyond the surface, you’ll also find many publications and reports on the website.
Besides Genc, the small digital team at The Global Fund consists of a digital publisher, and a data architect. They’ve relied on Umbraco for content and document publishing for the past seven years due to its flexibility, strong community support, and ease of use. At the moment they don’t work closely with a digital agency, but from time to time they engage an agency for custom development and new campaigns.
The team uses Umbraco Cloud for its development, staging, and live environments, and maintains an on-premises instance as a disaster recovery option.
Umbraco under the hood at The Global Fund
As Genc said, he considers Umbraco a well-integrated platform built on top of ASP.NET. As a user and developer, he finds it user-friendly and efficient, allowing him to publish, audit, test, and manage content quickly.
A key pain point throughout the years among many of our community members has been upgrading from one version to another, but at The Global Fund, it’s really been a smooth experience. Over the years they’ve been able to maintain changes across different versions, including the transition from version 7 to 8 and soon onwards to version 10. Umbraco’s support team has been helpful in preparing for upgrades and cleaning up sites during the process.
Genc also showed how they manage the homepage using a simple yet flexible content flow to make changes within seconds.
As a part of our call, Genc showed how they can easily make updates on the home page. On this screen you can find the so-called hero updates on the landing page.
He also shared details on Umbraco's language support, which has existed since version 7 and allowed them to automatically generate URLs for different languages. As a nice detail, they’ve been able to keep the links from their past system (Ektron), which is great both for the user experience and also for search engine indexing.
Additionally, the CMS's document management features and caching mechanisms have improved performance.
The organisation is now exploring Umbraco's subsites feature to create separate sites on different subdomains.
Managing multiple languages with ease
A key requirement for The Global Fund is to be able to manage their website in multiple languages. The organisation previously had a website in six languages but has since changed, retaining two separate nodes for different English and French respectively.
Umbraco allows for flexible language handling, either through Umbraco's built-in methods or by creating nodes and assigning languages. The CMS automatically detects and activates links in the detected language, making it possible to keep a timely and vendor-neutral link structure.
To save time, The Global Fund can easily upload and update translated documents, which are automatically linked and made available across the site.
Why did The Global Fund select Umbraco?
While Umbraco is far less known and less widely adopted than open source alternatives Drupal and Wordpress, the primary technical requirement was for the system to be based on .NET, and this quickly narrowed the list of potential vendors.
They also looked closely at flexibility and ease of migration. Umbraco's strong API and the availability of long-term support versions were significant factors that swayed it.
Also, with the many documents and media items, such as PDFs and photos, it was important that the CMS could make this work in the everyday operations. The Global Fund did their own evaluation without involving Umbraco HQ or an agency and they quickly found that the product was up for it.
Digital plans for 2024
The main plans for 2024 include creating dedicated subsites for countries and decoupling the institutional side from the operational side for more flexibility.
They are also exploring ways to connect to their internal document management systems, such as SharePoint, to create a documentation site.
They have also launched the first subsite for an archive and plan to create one dedicated to countries.
Finally, Genc covered the topic of digital sustainability, an area where Umbraco has been an early mover among the leading CMS vendors. At The Global Fund they are also analysing ways to optimise energy use and for the CMS it’s also relevant to improve the code and make the reduce carbon emissions.
Learn more about using Umbraco
We’ve covered Umbraco since the early days of getting to know them back in 2005. Here’s our two most recent posts:
Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable Systems (2024) - based on a member’s call with a UK-based Umbraco partner
How umbraco needs to change to survive (2018) - based on a presentation at the German Umbraco Festival
The conversation about successful implementations naturally continues in our peer groups and conferences. Umbraco is an active member in our CMS Experts community and also regular participant at our conferences.
Finally, two more things:
First an anecdote: Ektron founder Bill Rogers was among the participants on the call. The Global Fund used Ektron prior to Umbraco. Today, Bill is focused on his latest start-up ai12z, a generative AI Copilot platform
Secondly, there were no slides in the call, but plenty of live demo. Lean back and enjoy the recording below.