Membership WordPress Website Rebuild for MINT - Call for Proposals

Membership WordPress Website Rebuild for MINT

Call for Proposals

Introduction

The Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT) is an international, non-profit organization of trainers in motivational interviewing. The mission of MINT is to promote good practice in the use, research and training of motivational interviewing. MINT supports the continuing learning and skillfulness of its members through meetings, open sharing of resources, communication, publications, and shared practice opportunities. Rather than seeking to limit or control the practice and training of motivational interviewing, MINT promotes quality applications of motivational interviewing across cultures, languages, and contexts. MINT's 1,600+ members reside in more than 40 countries and speak more than 30 languages; internationality is central to MINT's make-up and an irreplaceable source of the richness it offers its members.

MINT  is seeking a web design and development agency to build a custom WordPress website. The project includes web design, web development and deployment of the new website hosted at https://motivationalinterviewing.org.

This document aims to describe the expected standard of the new website and project deliverables. We invite offers from web agencies and consultants that include the functionality described in this document and/or in the wireframes.

Certain pages and features are not included in the specifications but are expected to facilitate the normal functionality of the described website, such as UGC forms, log in pages, etc. We would like these implied components to be included in the estimates.

Rationale

MINT has been operating the current membership website for over a decade. In that time, web technologies have obviously moved forward and the organisation would like to take advantage of those improvements.

Users use the website to connect with the rest of roughly 1600 MINT members. The public-facing pages serve as an authoritative source of information on motivational interviewing.

The website therefore consists of two parts — a public website resembling any organisational website and a private, member-only part that facilitates communication between members, provides different opportunities for professional self-improvement, and keeps members up-to-date on the organisation.

The current website is built on Drupal 7 which is nearing end-of-life in November 2022. This project is a good opportunity to not only ensure future compatibility and support, but also to provide a more modern user experience for all members who use the membership platform.

 

Deliverables

1. Web Design

The website should be designed with modern but conservative style, following the wireframes and the current logo’s look and feel. The designs will need to include the mobile and tablet versions for the different unique templates making up the website.

The main overarching focus for this website is to facilitate a simple and accessible user experience.

  • it should always be clear where on the website the user is currently and whether they are logged in or out and how they might log in
  • the experience on mobile and desktop should be comparable with the focus on desktop UX
  • The web design should fully support internationalisation (LTR/RTL languages, character encoding — more in Languages)
  • the website should be accessible without using bolt-on solutions at WCAG 2.0 level or similar2.Web Development + QA

2. Web Development + QA

This is not a website that will be rebuilt again soon. We need a technical stack that will stand the test of time, with low overhead costs. Hence, we would prefer to use robust, industry-standard, and if possible, open-source software and avoid relying on experimentative solutions.

The website should be built with WordPress CMS with a custom or highly customised WordPress theme with maintainable, bloat-free code. The system must support Gutenberg.

We will ask the vendor to set up full regular automatic off-site backups (the backups must include the full website, including the user database and the forums).

Before the final sign-off, the vendor will be expected to provide the development documentation and basic user guides describing content and user management of the system.

The quality assurance (QA) is expected to be performed by the vendor and will include:

  • all of the provided content added to the website and user database migrated to the new website
  • test of the sign-up experience and transactional emails, GDPR implementation, url redirects, etc.
  • testing on different types of devices (with performance tests) — it will be expected that the newest browsers and devices are fully supported, and that the content pages load in under 3 seconds on average
  • test of integrations (as outlined below), GDPR implementation, and security (PCI compliance through a 3rd party payment processing provider — see Security and Data Protection)
  • 1 successful backup restore test from automated backups

Software Integrations

The website will be integrated with a couple of 3rd party scripts to facilitate the functionality needed. We are open to discussing other options with the vendor, but we are currently considering:

  • Authorize.net for payment processing (we currently only process 2 types of transactions — annual membership dues and donations to the organization – but may add further transaction types in the future)
  • Google Analytics (with up to 5 events) and Google Search Console for data
  • MailChimp form for segmented email marketing (see Email Marketing Segments) that securely integrates with the user database
  • WooCommerce (YITH WooCommerce Membership plugin or similar) for member management (see Membership Website and Subscriptions)
  • TBD software for online forums (we’re flexible — see chapter Online Forum)
  • DeepL for machine translation and WPML for language management (see Languages)
  • YoastSEO for basic SEO optimisation

Security and Data Protection

The website will need an SSL certificate and comply with PCI (through integration with Authorize.net). The user data on the server has to be encrypted and regularly auto-backed up.

The vendor is expected to work with our selected GDPR lawyer to help determine the privacy policy. This will include providing information on where the user data is hosted and who it is being shared with, as well as a compliant implementation of the cookie consent module.

Email Marketing Segments

The email database will include about 4 public (non-member) segments and about 5 segments of the member database.

3. Maintenance and Hosting

The financial part of the bid should include a separate item with a realistic projection of the costs associated with technical website maintenance for 12 months.

This will include:

  • Dependable hosting that can accommodate a minimum of 250.000 monthly page views
  • Monthly updates of WordPress and plugins with basic testing of the front-end (including keeping certificates up-to-date)
  • Max 1 working day’s turnaround time for critical fixes (e.g. backup restore)
  • Automated hourly SSL and uptime monitoring
  • 1 yearly backup restore test from automated backups

The maintenance does not include content management or additional software fees. Domain name is registered and paid for by the organisation.

Please provide the rates for out-of-scope maintenance, user support, and development work.

 

Technical specifications

Site-Wide Functionality

Responsiveness and Accessibility

The website needs to be fully responsive and support the newest browsers and devices, including (X)HDPI screens.

The new website needs to be accessible without using bolt-on solutions at WCAG 2.0 level. We are not required to be compliant but we will ask the vendor to build the website according to the standard (with some leeway depending on the solutions and implementation).

Making the content accessible is not a part of this project.

 

Membership Website and Subscriptions

This website features a member-only area marked blue in the wireframes.

The website must facilitate the annual payment of membership dues (subscription) for all members, collection of donations to the organization, and the normally-expected functionality of logging in and out of an account, as well as display and hide content based on the current login status as outlined under Pages and Components.

The system must allow exporting of the user database from the back end and facilitate full member management (eg. ability to manually change the data associated with user accounts).

 

User Levels

The website will feature the following user levels:

  • Member (can pay membership dues, participate in forums, upload new resources and create events, etc)
  • Administrator (can do high-level CMS administration as defined in WordPress Codex)
  • Moderators (can modify content across the website and moderate forums)
  • Special Moderators (can modify content in their respective Chapter or interest group page, and can modify any member’s membership in their Chapter or interest group).

In the future, we might implement another tier of paid member accounts with limited access to the platform. The implementation should account for this potential future addition.

 

Search

Website search functionality must provide a way to limit the scope to the current context — for example, if a user searches inside the forums, the results should reflect that or allow easy filtering.

The search functionality everywhere on the website needs to consider “empty state” and facilitate a good user experience even when results are not available.

 

Languages

The website must support the following languages:

Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish    

with the option of extending the list in the future.

Web design and development must accommodate for language direction, font size, character encoding for all of the listed languages.

Some of the content will be manually translated into different languages which will be facilitated with a solution like WPML.

In addition, the website must allow machine translation on-the-fly with a solution like DeepL or GTranslate.io (currently in use).

 

SEO

We would like to avoid losing organic traffic during the migration of the website.

The vendor will be provided a list of the top 100 visited URLs and will be expected to match them exactly on the new website (or set up 301 redirects).

The new website will need basic technical SEO:

  • The public parts of the site will need to be crawlable and indexable,
  • Served on a single url (https://motivationalinterviewing.org) over https without errors,
  • Provide a sitemap (can be created with YoastSEO).

 

Pages and Components

The website is made up of thousands of individual pages built with about 10 unique page templates. This chapter describes the details of the most critical pages and components.

Content

Content public/logged-in

Content template sample use

The content template is a generic template with a couple of different layouts that will serve to create text-heavy pages (e.g. About MINT,  What is MI?). The template must fully support as many different content formats as possible, at the minimum images with captions, video embeds, text with all formatting supported.

The current wireframe suggests an in-page navigation (TOC) but that can change depending on the final web design.

Home

Home public

Home logged-in

The home page displayed to the public and non-logged in members features some static content and a few modules that are being reused on sub-pages:

  • Essential resources (also shown on public Library page)
  • Next TNTs (Training for New Trainers) (also shown on public Events page, along with other events like ICMI - International Conference on Motivational Interviewing) with email list sign-up form
  • Featured updates (content also shown on logged-in version of Home page under Updates)

Home — logged in

Once logged in, the member can access a dashboard with information about their membership, profile, add new events and resources and catch up on new content on the website since their last visit.

The member can select the frequency and topic of the email updates they receive (see Email Marketing Segments and Online Forum for more information).

The Updates allow the member to catch up and filter through notifications:

  • General MINT news (new posts in News)
  • Featured updates (items featured on the Home page)
  • New trainings & non-training events (events added since member’s last visit)
  • New resources (resources added since member’s last visit)
  • Chapter or interest group updates (if the member belongs to a Chapter or interest group, like the “Nordic Chapter”, they can receive updates on the respective Chapter or interest group)

 

Members List

Members List public

Members List logged-in

Members List single member

The list of roughly 1600 members should be searchable by text and filterable by 3 taxonomies.

The members will be included in the list once they opt-in from their profile settings page.

 

Library

Library public

Library logged-in

Library single resource

The “Getting started” top box features essential resources — they also display on the public Home page. When logged in, the box displays a link to add your own resources.

The list of 500—1000 resources is to be searchable and filterable by about 5 taxonomies.

The original digital resources should be hosted securely and in a way that it doesn’t affect server performance.

Search results page should create a unique url that can be linked to (deep link). These links will be used throughout the website, for example on the Chapter pages.

Some resources will be member-only and will not display in the public list to logged-out members.

The resources will be in different formats, with the majority being a downloadable pdf. Other formats include embedded YouTube/Vimeo videos, audio, and resources hosted externally. The design should accommodate these different formats in a sensible way.

 

Trainings

Trainings public

Trainings logged-in

Trainings single event

The “Next TNTs” box features TNT events and an integrated email list sign-up form that automatically segments new subscribers as being interested in TNT events. For a full list of segments, see Email Marketing Segments.

The list of about 100 events (at a given time) is to be searchable and filterable by about 6 taxonomies.

The Trainings page should work as expected from events pages, with automatic expiry and deletion of old events as well as two different views — one of which is a calendar view.

 

Chapters

Chapters public

Nordic Chapter (individual chapter)  

Four other chapters currently: gerMINT (German), MINTned (Dutch), MINT Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands), UK & Ireland MINT

Chapters are independently chartered organizations that maintain a formal relationship with and receive financial support from MINT. Chapters have applied for chapter status and represent MINT in the region and languages of the chapter. Chapters maintain their own membership rosters and in some cases include individuals who are not members of MINT as non-voting members.

Other interest groups are informal groupings of members and are sub-segments of the member database.

Each member can belong to one chapter (or none) and several interest groups (or none). Their membership in the Chapter or interest group is visible on their profile page if they opt-in.

The main Chapter page links to individual Chapter pages (such as Nordic Chapter wireframe linked above) or to an external website. Individual Chapter pages are managed by Chapter moderators (see Membership Types).

 

News

News page operates as a normal blog in WordPress and is not depicted in the wireframes. Posts published in News will show up in a separate sub-page and also in user Updates (see Home — logged in).

 

Online Forum

Forum logged in (sample solution)

The current customised forum solution works on the Drupal CMS. We would like to ideally migrate the content in the forum to a new, modern, integrated discussion board solution.

This might not be possible, so as an alternative, we might archive the current forum and start a new one on the new system.

We are open to discussing discussion board solutions with the vendor. In selecting the solution, we will take into account the vendor’s capacities and recommendations given the overall solution.

Besides the expected functionality, the discussion board must:

  • Allow receiving notifications about new posts in a thread the user is following
  • Allow participating in the forums by responding to the email notification.
  • Seamlessly integrate its email notifications and its settings with the selected email marketing software, the user database, and the overall system.
  • Seamlessly integrate with the profile settings, log in, and other essential functionality described in this document or implied in facilitating a simple and secure user experience.
  • Allow organisation of threads into categories, advanced search with results limited to the forum only (see more in Search), and deep linking of individual threads.

 

How to Apply

The website is built on Drupal 7 which is nearing end-of-life in November 2022. We would ideally like to launch the new website before then but we are aware of the possibility it might take longer.

The bids should include the following elements:

  • information on the expected start date of the project and its projected stages and timeline,
  • financial offer for the project as outlined in this document
  • portfolio of past work similar in type and scope to this project
  • information on the agency or consultant and resources that will be allocated to this project
Criteria for evaluation of bids:
 
  • Experience – firm has successfully completed similar projects.
  • Pricing – proposed cost of the project. The offer needs to include everything outlined in this CFP including the maintenance as described.
  • Resources Allocated – please describe who will carry out the technical aspect and project management and at what capacity.
  • Timeline — please provide a realistic timeline to complete this project.
  • Presentation – proposal information is presented clearly, logically and is well-organized and bid delivered on time.

Any inquiries about the CFP should be directed to our website consultant, Heidi Pungartnik: heidi.pungartnik@gmail.com, with a copy to board@motivationalinterviewing.org  

Deadline for questions is 15 August 2022.

Bids should be sent to board@motivationalinterviewing.org by 21 August 2022.

We will make a selection by 5 September 2022 with the expected start date of 15 September 2022.      

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