Capturing Diverse Audiences

Launching The BAFTA Suite of Websites

About BAFTA

When you hear “BAFTA”, you probably think ‘film awards’, ‘celebrities’,

‘a red carpet’ - and you’re not wrong, that is a big part of BAFTA, our

annual Film awards ceremony is what we’re best known for.

But, there’s also a lot more than that. We have an incredibly important

message to spread, and a vastly diverse audience to reach...

About BAFTA

Leading UK charity supporting and championing the art forms of the

moving image. Represent film, television and games.

Backed by over 6,000 members, all experts within these industries.

Over 200 educational events held each year and run an array of

scholarships and initiatives geared towards supporting industry talent.

Branches in Scotland, Wales, New York and Los Angeles and in the

past year have launched a programme of activity in Hong Kong.

The Audience Spectrum

● Members

● Career Starters

● Industry Professionals

● Gamers

● Film Enthusiasts

● TV Fans

● Celebrity Obsessives

● Internal Stakeholders

● Customers

● Global Branches

● TV Viewing Audience

● Sponsors

● USA Audience

● Venue Hire Customers

The Audience Spectrum

Our websites need to service all of these audiences and to deliver an

online experience that will make BAFTA relevant to them whilst

embodying the value of excellence that the organisation is known for.

Audiences’ expectations of a good online brand experience have

increased rapidly and this time last year, our websites were not fit for

purpose.

We have launched eight websites in 12 months.

Eight New Sites Launched in Twelve Months

Key Requirement: Improve User Experience

Existing Data Structure Proposed Data Structure

Key Requirement: Improve User Experience

Completely migrate the main BAFTA website including all sub-sites

onto a stable, reliable & user friendly CMS.

Fully responsive interface. Many pages used tables for layout.

Improve the content folder structure and ease the workload for editors.

Unify all BAFTA websites with ‘global navigation’ to allow one-click

access between brands/microsites.

Key Requirements: Integrating With Third Parties

Third Light

Integrate Third Light digital asset

management system for easy media

embedding - direct from the red carpet!

Salesforce

Provide a customised experience for

logged-in members by integrating BAFTA’s

Salesforce CRM.

Key Requirements: Peak Traffic on Awards Nights

Robust, scalable infrastructure that can cope with the enormous peaks

in traffic we see on awards nights.

So, why Drupal?

Investigated an array of CMS each with their own

pros and cons. Drupal seemed to fit our requirements:

● open source

● adaptable & extendable with modules

● huge developer community

● tight user permissions control

● easy to connect to other sites and services

To deliver this brief we worked with two agencies both experts in Drupal

builds; Access and Loft 49.

Improve The User Experience: UX / UI Design

Improve The User Experience: UX / Wireframing

Improve The User Experience: UX / Wireframing

The wireframing process:-

● Hand drawn sketches

● Concepts for global navigation

● Internal review

● Annotated Illustrator wireframes

● Client review and amends

● Branding design over wireframes

● Stakeholder review

● HTML prototyping / interaction design

● Conversion to Drupal theme

Improve The User Experience: Global Navigation

‘Global navigation’ was crucial for tying the brand sites together.

Global Navigation - In Action

Global Navigation - In Action

Improve The User Experience: Small Screen Navigation

Improve The User Experience: www.bafta.org

Improve The User Experience: guru.bafta.org

Technical Solutions that address audiences needs

● Digital Asset Management integration with Third Light

○ Internal audience; stakeholders, content editors, marketing

● Membership area with Salesforce CRM

○ BAFTA members

● Infrastructure: peak traffic on Awards nights

○ Awards audience, driven by TV coverage

Integrating With Third Parties: Third Light

Image management and CDN platform.

Used by BAFTA to store imagery from awards nights

Integrated with Drupal by creating two bespoke modules:-

● Third Light field module

● Third Light WYSIWYG module

Integrating With Third Parties: Third Light

Create an integration module to provide central location for API calls.

Create dependent modules that bridge between integration module and

Drupal elements.

Integrating With Third Parties: Third Light Settings

Integrating With Third Parties: Third Light Browser

Integrating With Third Parties: Third Light Field Widget

Integrating With Third Parties: Third Light WYSIWYG

Integrating With Third Parties: Salesforce

Salesforce is used by BAFTA to manage memberships

Integration with Drupal done using Scribe to

create a members area on BAFTA website

No Drupal configuration needed

Scribe can also integrate with other systems

Integrating With Third Parties: Salesforce

Scribe is a ‘middleman’ between

Salesforce and MySQL

Scribe agent watches for changes in

both platforms and syncs the data across

This includes:

- Members

- Membership information

- Messaging and alerts from Salesforce

Integrating With Third Parties: Salesforce

Creation of intermediate tables that map to

Salesforce objects

Triggers in MySQL used to copy data into

Drupal and visa-versa

Pro tips:

● You need to know the Drupal database really well

● Automated testing is a must

Peak Traffic on Awards Nights: Infrastructure

High levels of traffic on major awards nights

Needed a scalable hosting solution that could be ramped up on

selected evenings

Rackspace cloud chosen as the hosting platform

Load balancer

Web nodes

MySQL master

MySQL slave

NFS Solr

Peak Traffic on Awards Nights: Infrastructure

Peak Traffic on Awards Nights: Infrastructure

● Rackspace Load Balancer provides unified front end

● Sites are hosted on a number of web nodes

● Each node consisting of a Varnish/Apache setup

● NFS used to have a single file system shared between all web

nodes

● High performance MySQL master/slave setup

● Solr provides the search solution

● Ansible used to provision all machines automatically

Peak Traffic on Awards Nights: Infrastructure

In the run-up to awards night new nodes are provisioned and added to

the load balancer

Caches on each web node are warmed and site is load tested using

loader.io service

After awards night the nodes are scaled down to normal service

Thank You

Pippa Irvine, Digital Communications Manager, BAFTA

@pippairvine

Billy Bamford, Loft 49

@loft49

Phil Norton, Technical Lead, Access

@philipnorton42