Project Portfolio

The UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) is the organizing body of 40 agencies, funds, and programs working on development at the regional and global levels, as well as locally in over 140 countries around the world. The Group’s public-facing website serves the purpose of promoting their work and providing transparency into the UN’s development work around the world and efforts toward their 2030 agenda.

The new site, built on Drupal 8, presents information from data points and documents drawn from a variety of UN APIs. The layout makes extensive use of Drupal’s Layout API and custom block library, and the custom visualizations are done in Elm. Gizra handled the full site build, working closely with the UN stakeholders and an external design agency, and rapidly developing the site on a 12-week timetable.

Gizra performed a multilingual migration from the legacy RedDot CMS for UNICEF’s new global and branch websites under Drupal 8.

In addition, Gizra served in an advisory role implementing a process of code review and technical project management that helps the organization better support its Global Communication and Public Advocacy Strategy. The project started with a technical audit and recommendations, implementing an internal development workflow, applying best practices for code review, and implementing automatic tests.

Ihangane provides counseling to Rwandan mothers with HIV to prevent the transmission of the virus to their child. Gizra has developed a mobile application that helps nurses record measurements from evaluations and display historical progress back to the mother. Because bandwidth conditions in Rwanda are variable, Gizra implemented a progressive web app, allowing for offline collection of data, storing things like images in the local device storage, until a bandwidth is available to upload to the backend.

As part of the UN Development Coordination Office’s work organizing 40 agencies, funds, and programs around the world, they sought to give each “country team” a web presence to promote their work in the country and to provide transparency to journalists and stakeholders. Until this project, each team managed their own site on a variety of CMS platforms, using different designs, and with adherence to different IT standards.

The new multisite system hosts the web presence for the United Nations in over 140 developing nations. Built on top of the Organic Groups contributed module (which Gizra maintains), all sites are managed with one codebase and one database, making ongoing maintenance and development a remarkably efficient task. Gizra worked with an external designer and performed its own UX analysis to build functionality compatible with the workflow of UN Country teams.

The Schuler Foundation, through the Schuler Scholar Program, provides college opportunities for underrepresented high school students, who would be first-generation college students in their family. Their new website needed to represent the values of the foundation and the transformational impact the program has on the students and their family. After a comprehensive discovery and landscape analysis – Schuler isn’t the only college-opportunity program, but it has a unique approach – we embarked upon a new Drupal 8 site which would both promote the program and register applicants.

The site is multilingual and features layout tools unique to Drupal 8. Using the contributed Paragraphs module, site administrators have fine-grained control over layout within content types and almost every text string on the site is customizable. The application system leverages Drupal 8’s form modes to provide a multi-step application, which applicants can save, edit, and return to over time. Applicant data syncs seamlessly with the organization’s Saleforce CRM, where reviewers can evaluate applicants.

Unio by Harness is a presentation software for educators to help increase student engagement in the classroom, including real-time updates between students and teachers, and complex user interfaces. Gizra inherited this project and quickly identified architecture and quality improvement opportunities. With a tight schedule and budget, Gizra was able to fix and enhance the tool in a few months with all the major functionality in place, over a flexible architecture to support the ease of future features. This is an ongoing, end-to-end project that allows Gizra to ensure quality and performance in all the aspects of the application.

OpenScholar is a full-featured solution for university systems, powering thousands of Harvard University websites. Its strength is in its ability to allow departments, faculty, students, and projects to spin up websites with the click of a button, and with enforceable standards, look and feel, and sensible defaults.

Gizra is an integral part of the core development team for OpenScholar stemming from our intimate knowledge of the Drupal-contributed Organic Groups module on top of which OpenScholar is built. In addition, Gizra developed the entire automatic test suite, which is now the largest of any Drupal distributions.

Gizra was one of several agencies contracted to build and maintain 160 websites, including the organization’s main website. Gizra was specifically selected for expertise in Drupal, continuous integration, and high-level quality assurance. Gizra helped plan the architecture and performed the code review for all sites, as well as setting up a new hosting environment that reduced cost and considerably boosted performance. In ongoing development, complex Drupal tasks are handed over to our developers.

The European Commission selected Gizra to create a project tool to manage billions of Euros invested in developing world projects. Gizra helped define the tool and was responsible for design, implementation, and deployment. The challenge was to provide a simple and clean interface to vast amounts of data in a large multilingual organization.

Our success led to the complementary Capacity4Dev project, where Gizra is in charge of the UX, consulting, and development of the new version.

The National Library of Israel commissioned Gizra to create a virtual exhibition for Madrid’s Casa del Lector museum. Visitors were given tablets to navigate the exhibition content via an interactive map-like interface, providing access to video, audio, and text-based media. The visitor could tap a node and instantaneously highlight its connections within the network of content. A second tap took the user to the node content which contained various options to interact with material. This sleek design and innovative approach was a refreshing alternative to usual museum tours.

FindYourSummer is a program of the Jewish Education Project in New York and is dedicated to helping teens find meaningful Jewish summer experiences. They have amassed a catalogue of nearly 400 summer programs, and when they decided to expand their Drupal site into a more sophisticated tool for sorting options, comparing calendars, and sharing lists. Gizra developed a drop-in Elm application (in a Drupal Panel page) – the result is a “summer planner” that allows the user to tag programs, and send them by email or create a custom page on the website to share.

Built in collaboration with Commerce Guys, Commerce Kickstart is high performance and easy to use eCommerce-focused Drupal distribution, used by McDonald’s, LUSH and other leading brands. The project allows retail operations to leverage the strengths of Drupal’s complex content management and permissions, while providing a full-suite of tools necessary for e-commerce.

The iCenter sought out Gizra for their third project together based on the successes and learnings from the workflow on previous projects.

When the iCenter looked to redesign their website, they had an aggressive timetable in order to launch before their biennial international conference. By applying The Gizra Way with clear and constant communication through online task tracking and regular face-to-face (video conferenced) scrum meetings, the project was completed within the time frame and the anticipated budget, without the need to divert precious human resources away from other important projects.

The IBLI project questioned the logic of the status quo of insurance access to pastoral farmers in Kenya. The client needed a way to demonstrate that they could compile existing data, process it with known algorithms, and produce logical, readable maps so that farmers in Africa could be insured on the open market.

With Gizra’s help, ILRI was able to focus on the things that they were good at: providing high-level research and working with local farmers to adopt to change. Gizra was able to work on the technological mechanism to help make that change.

Gizra developed and implemented the new responsive design for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Admissions Department. Faced with the need to convey its well-established brand, and speak to a multitude of potential applicants, the University sought Gizra for a solution. Together, we transformed the existing traditional site into a user-friendly, but content-rich, fully-accessible interface, geared to the demanding needs of its user community.

Danel is an online Human Resource and Staffing web service, connecting employers with potential employees.

Gizra advised, implemented, and maintains the new website for one of the top staffing agencies in Israel. This end-to-end project includes connecting to the organization’s CRM, managing the ongoing process of posting job offers and user applications, and promoting the brand online. The user facing features include a resume building tool and a smart agent where the users can sets job opportunity notifications.

Gizra presents a new approach in live and online auction trade - exposing and positioning traditional Judaica objects and manuscripts, in this case, in an in-house online platform especially developed to simplify the procedure of public auctions. Bidding is made easy and accessible at any time online, simplifying the process for both the seller and purchaser, thereby increasing the number of transactions.

Birthright Israel, the largest Jewish Educational project in the world, needed to develop a recruitment, registration, and online-learning platform for its U.S.-based experiential educators. Through this platform, the initiative trains 200 educators a year.

Gizra helped to develop a streamlined user experience that allowed applicants to learn about the program, register, and participate in three learning modules that prepared participants in key concepts in experiential education and best practices in program planning for an educational experience in Israel. In addition, Gizra developed a resources exchange which allows fellows to document program design and share and reflect with other cohort members.