When one University of Toronto Temerty Faculty of Medicine site became a group of three—and then 20—the Temerty Faculty of Medicine called on Foster to help tame the beast. What we developed ended up reimagining what Drupal could do, simplifying our client’s work and greatly magnifying their impact.

The University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine is one of the oldest in North America, first created when the School of Medicine was founded in 1843. 

It’s also one of the largest, with approximately 9,000 faculty and staff, 7,000 learners, nine fully affiliated hospitals, and scores of other care sites. 

However—from a Web perspective at least—the most important figure is 50, the number of separate departments, Research Centres, and other units that comprise the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. 

You need an organization of that complexity to train doctors, of course. But as our client at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine came to discover—when those separate areas each want a website, complexity can be a killer.

Initially, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine needed only to revamp their flagship website, a task they handled ably. 

And when the Graduate Program and Physician Assistant Program—which had previously been integrated into the main website—needed to be spun out, the answer seemed simple. Using the main site as a template, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine created two clones and allowed the programs to customize as they saw fit.

That’s when the trouble began. Our client quickly realized that three custom sites meant three times the maintenance and support, so they asked us for help. We had built the initial flagship site, so we were happy to be tackling this new challenge.

Once we had the lay of the land, the solution was clear. 

We built a Drupal Distribution, a full copy of all the Drupal code that powered the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s site. We also set up a Custom Upstream, a Pantheon product that acts as a scaffold on which anyone of any skill level can build a new website. 

This combination enabled our client to launch new Department websites with little more than a click. Each new site would share the same features but remain independent of the others. In other words, if one site crashed, the others would stay online. Sites might have shared features, but they certainly didn’t share risk.

Crucially, the sites would also share the same changes and updates. So eventually,  with some work to remake the two spinoff sites into proper “children” of the Distribution, it became easier for our client to maintain all three.

That is until the collection of three Department websites had become 20—at which point they understandably handed maintenance off to us.
 

Supporting the nearly two dozen sites was simple enough: push security updates to the Distribution, then—one at a time—cascade those updates to each of the sites, checking that everything still worked as expected, and then deploying each site.

“Simple” didn’t mean “quick,” however. Eventually, the sheer amount of time consumed by even a small update drove us to look for a different solution.

That’s when we created Webpac, a custom “next-level” Distribution that was key to the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s continued ability to roll out websites.

Where a Distribution full of pre-assembled “bundles” of features had represented a leap forward from vanilla Drupal, Webpac was a similar leap again. 

In a Webpac Distribution, a core group of features would roll out automatically to every new site. However, site owners could also choose from optional pre-approved, pre-coded features that they could enable or disable with the click of a mouse. 

Suddenly, if a particular Department wanted a new feature—professor biographies, for example—getting it was as simple as pushing a button.

Two basic rules governed Webpac. 

First, no new website could auto-install a feature that hadn’t already been tested and made available to every other site.

And second, if one or more Departments did need a new feature, they could get it by paying to have it created, tested, and made available to all the others. 

In this way, we were able to maintain the integrity of the Webpac Distribution, reduce maintenance, and ensure that Webpac would continue to power each new site added to the fold.

As it turned out, Webpac couldn’t have come at a better time: in 2018, we learned that our client’s (by then) 35+ Temerty Faculty of Medicine sites needed to move off Drupal 7 because of that platform’s end-of-life announcement. 

Worse, because Drupal 8 would be built on an entirely new codebase, we would have to remake Webpac before we could use it to upgrade the Faculty’s websites. 

Fortunately, as much work as that was, it was still infinitely more manageable than rebuilding the sites from scratch. 

Webpac 2 was born, and over the intervening months, we relaunched every site, plus another ten that were created net-new. Thanks to Webpac 2, our client now manages 45 sites with only a team of two staff members, neither one a web developer or IT expert. 

We think that fact speaks directly to what we were trying to create with Webpac—a simple way for anyone with any skill level to spin out websites.

What’s more, the principles behind Webpac 2 could be easily used to roll out sites other Faculties at the University of Toronto, or even for other universities. Corporate customers with multiple regional sites could also benefit greatly from a Webpac-style Distribution. 

Webpac represents nothing less than the ability to scale digital assets without multiplying costs—an advantage that we’re excited to bring to others in the future.
 

After drawing a years-long, staggeringly successful fundraising effort to a close, the University of Toronto asked Foster to help launch its new “Defy Gravity” campaign. The challenge was significant, but Foster embraced it—and exceeded expectations.

In 2011, the University of Toronto launched what would go on to be the most successful fundraising and alumni engagement campaign in Canadian history. Over the course of a decade, the “Boundless” campaign saw more than 104,000 donors from more than 100 countries give over $2.6 billion.

For ten years, Boundless helped raise the University’s profile by telling impactful stories, sharing news and announcements, and supporting advancement teams in all their fundraising efforts. But after such a long time, U of T felt the campaign had reached its natural end.

But how do you follow up on the most successful philanthropic effort in Canadian history? The University started by rebranding the campaign with a global advertising agency—and developing a new flagship website with Foster Interactive.

From the RFP Invitation to Quote:

In working with the ad agency, the University developed a new brand platform and a new name—“Defy Gravity.” And when they were ready to execute on that positioning, we were prepared.

Planning for the build was split into three broad areas.

Information Architecture

First came a combination of the technical planning for the build and designing the site’s navigation and structure.

The University’s web team had significant experience with WordPress, so we already knew we’d be building on that platform. But we still needed to spend considerable time defining the new site’s content strategy and information architecture.

Why? Out of the ad agency’s work had come a new way to think about how to attract donors. The University’s Advancement Division had learned that people don’t simply want to write a cheque—they want to engage with the University on a drilled-down “micro” level. (For example, one person might wish to help build a university residence; another might want to earmark their donation for indigenous women’s studies.) The strategy became one of sharing emotional, compelling stories about how donations make a difference in real people’s lives—to help donors invest in outcomes that U of T facilitated.

However, this new granularity around donations led to approximately 800 different funds to which donors could give.

The University categorized the funds into seven campaign priorities:

• Support Student Success
• Create a Sustainable Future
• Build Inclusive Cities and Societies
• Enable Healthy Lives
• Drive Scientific Discovery
• Spark Creativity and Culture
• Power Innovation and Entrepreneurship

These “buckets” provided the backbone of the site’s navigation and served as both the central organizing scheme and the framework of the campaign.

Initially, the groupings were more abstract than they could have been. So we did four rounds of A/B testing to see what structures and labels in the navigation would be most intuitive for alumni and donors. Those extensive tests helped us solidify the themes and sub-themes in the new site’s navigation menu.
 

Concurrently, we started planning the content itself, focusing on storytelling instead of simple “fact-presenting.” After all, the goal was to help donors engage with the outcomes the University creates. 

We had a hunch (that we tested, of course) that on-the-ground stories of real people would perform better—and lead, in turn, to even more donations.

We also worked quite closely with U of T’s content teams on getting the words written. First, we created wireframes and content templates, then helped their content teams create pages to those specifications, and then iterated on designs as the finalized content came together.

Finally, we began planning and iterating on the design, going from rough concepts to a finished presentation in a remarkably short time. This also happened at nearly the same time as the other planning phases.

Complicating matters was the fact that the University was still developing and refining the site’s visual identity after we had started working on the website. So we spent time helping U of T bring their ideas to life— doing art direction, exploring ideas, introducing fonts and colours, and refining and iterating our designs until we achieved what’s on the site today.

Working through project approvals was a highly complex task, but we adapted well to changing needs. The University adapted, too, responding positively to design and execution elements that we felt heightened and extended this flagship execution of their brand platform. 

And when the site launched on December 15, 2021, we had done it—together, Foster and the U of T had brought “Defy Gravity” into the world.

We’ve worked with the Division of Advancement for several years, which means they’ve come to trust us as team members. There’s no doubt that closeness was a direct contributor to the success of this project.

Having an idea of what issues might pop up is invaluable during a website build. It’s what helps us appreciate the complexity that an organization like the University of Toronto faces in their day-to-day work. 

It also helps us anticipate problems that senior staff will face as they seek approvals—and head them off before they have the chance derail a project. We plan for this need as a part of our process, and always have contingency plans ready to help cut off significant delays. Few external vendors would be able to anticipate these potential issues, but our extensive experience with both U of T and this team makes it happen.

After all, we work hard with all our clients to establish rapport and trust. And with many of them, we’re lucky enough to help them for years, not just months. 

That kind of trust is essential with a complicated build like Defy Gravity—and it’s one of the factors that helped us ensure the site would launch to such success.