Enabling Educators at Azim Premji Foundation

Azim Premji Foundation (APF) is a leading not-for-profit organisation that has been working for more than a decade now towards making deep, large scale and institutionalised impact on the quality and equity of education in India, along with related development areas.
Azim Premji Foundation (APF) has a team of 1200 educators, facilitators and leaders spread over 50 Districts in India helping government school improve quality of education through workshops, teacher development programs, teaching material.

APF approached us to help build a portal for their field team to collaborate and share resources. This would be a central hub for field executives to share primary aspects of their day to day work like reports, resources event follow-ups, etc. allowing for better sharing and visibility of their work, as well as bringing about a larger social impact.
1200+

100%

50



- Digitisation of fieldwork data such as reports, resources, publications.
- Planning and follow up on engagements like workshops, school visits, etc.
- Single dashboard to filter and retrieve all fieldwork data.
- Granular access for data upload as per existing organizational structure, location, and role-based.

- Portal’s primary users are field executives, who typically are not used to the digital way of doing things.
- As field executives are often overloaded with fieldwork, we were cautious to make sure that portal didn’t feel like another task to complete or a daily hassle.
- It was important that the portal gets their buy-in and they understand its utility; we employed a design thinking process to understand user personas to come up with constraints and success criteria for the project.
- The process helped us to fine-tune the backlog and visualise how features should work.
100% of traffic on the site is authenticated traffic and performance is critical for the success of a portal like this, we achieved performance goals with the following steps:
- Optimizing the content structure and the associated views
- Frontend Performance: Optimising Images, CSS Rendering, and JS optimisations
- Memcache for views/session and data caching

Building on top of Drupal 8 was already proving to be a great decision; fetching great feedback from field stakeholders on CMS capabilities and we designed a quick roadmap to bring the next set of features on the portal.
Views_conditional : (Drupal 8 port)
Views_Extras
Better_exposed_filters : (Drupal 8 port)
Client-side hierarchical select