AMNESTY NZ
Building a unified human rights platform
CLIENT:
AMNESTY AOTEAROA
ROLE:
LEAD DEVELOPER
COMPANY:
FLIGHT DIGITAL
STACK:
- REACT
- TYPESCRIPT
- GATSBY JS
- SANITY CMS
- ALGOLIA
- STRIPE
Identifying, streamlining and scaling.
One of the largest challenges within this build was finding a seamless way to bring multiple third party integrations into one platform. The integrations handled donations, petition signing, social outreach, and needed to feed into their CRM software.
During the planning phase, I identified a lot of software bloat and unused features within these integrations. So the first piece of planning was to identify what the client was and wasn’t using in their current workflow, and streamlining the process as we went. Doing so allowed me to design a custom content system that took only the essentials from the integrations and pull these together as a single platform on the front end.
The result was an efficient CMS that streamlined Amnesty NZ’s content, alongside a scalable, fast and economical website that empowers, advocates and informs.
The architecture.
Based on past experience, I knew that Sanity CMS handled customisation well, so it was perfect for this project. Sanity was key in allowing me to create custom page and form structures that could not only handle the third party integrations, but could also be used anywhere on the site.
Translating this set-up to the front end was challenging due to the third party APIs. As I was constrained to using the integrations’ APIs rather than creating my own, preserving site speed was a big challenge. I used Gatsby static site generation to optimise page load speeds, and executed the API calls via Netlify Serverless functions, resulting in a nice separation between the content and functional layers of the site.
Where possible, I deployed Cron based schedular functions to handle large uploads of data to the CRM, which also contributed to large speed improvements. These optimisations resulted in significant lighthouse scores improvements, leading to a happy client.
