Redfern Legal Centre (RLC)

Overview

Redfern Legal Centre (RLC) is a not-for-profit community legal centre dedicated to increasing access to justice and advancing human rights. Founded in 1977, RLC have been working for people experiencing disadvantage for over 45 years focusing on human rights, social justice, discrimination, domestic abuse, international students and police and government accountability.

Morpht has a commitment to giving back to the community and was approached by design agency partner Folk, to assist in the rebuilding of the RLC website. This pro-bono project was a great opportunity for Morpht to support local legal aid and to help people experiencing disadvantage.

Folk worked on redesigning the branding and front-end components while Morpht undertook the work on the content mapping, migration and rebuild of the site from Drupal 7 into Drupal 9.

The challenge

With a lot of services shifting online during the COVID-19 pandemic, RLC saw the need to improve their digital services and user experience for their clients seeking legal aid. Services that were usually face-to-face needed to shift online. With a higher percentage of users on mobile, as well as needing to consider that 1 in 10 users had a disability of some kind. Improvements were needed for findability of information, accessibility and online intake of clients.

The Solution

During the discovery phase it was identified the shift to online services driven by the COVID-19 pandemic meant the website is often the first touch point for their clients. Morpht’s solution to enhance the accessibility and findability of content was to implement Convivial CXP in the new Drupal 9 build.

Drupal 9 and Convivial CXP

The old RLC website was built in Drupal 7 which was nearing end-of-life. So a key requirement of this project was the redevelopment of the site into Drupal 9.

As a starting point of the development, we implemented Convivial CXP which is a Drupal 9 starter site for personalization, editor experience, accessibility and integration. Convivial CXP comes with many useful content types already set up, as well as a personalization strategy for the client’s particular needs. Using modules such as Personified, it is able to utilise the user profile to deliver personalized experiences for the users.

Editor experience

Being a not-profit organisation, RLC is also required to be able to manage, edit and update the website inhouse and to reduce the need for external resources. Morpht’s commitment to giving website managers, authors and editors the tools to build out page layouts is to include multiple view modes and components in the build.

Data migration

The RLC already had quite a substantial Drupal 7 site with 1387 articles and 343 resources stretching back a number of years. It was vital to preserve this content and uplift it for the new build. Morpht was able to export the content from the old site and import it using the Migrate module and custom scripts.

Accessibility

Clients use their mobile as the main source for first contact with RLC and with the knowledge that 1 in 10 users have a disability of some kind, accessibility was a major requirement for this project. To ensure everyone who requires RLC’s services or is looking for information, Convivial CXP semantic HTML and components are designed for accessibility for WCAG 2.0 AA compliance.

Morpht were such a pleasure to work with and created an amazing, award-winning website for us that all of our staff and clients absolutely love. It looks modern, it's easy to navigate and it represents our brand perfectly. We couldn't recommend them more highly.

Alexis Goodstone | Acting CEO, Principal Solicitor

The outcome

Morpht and Folk were able to provide RLC with a new website on Drupal 9, which opened their digital services to disadvantaged people within the community. Improved findability of content, clear navigation and structure, use of online forms for client intake and accessibility enhancements means RLC’s services are easily accessible by everyone in need of legal aid.