Case study · Sustainable Brands · 2020
Integrated Web Platform
An integrated web platform for Sustainable Brands, unifying conferences, content, and member services under one digital home for the global community of purpose-driven leaders.
The brief
Sustainable Brands is the global community for business leaders who say their work has a purpose beyond shareholder return. Their flagship in-person event runs 2,500 to 3,500 attendees across three or four days, with regional events through the year, a corporate membership program and a year-round digital footprint that has to stitch the whole community together between gatherings.
When I was first introduced, the site was running on a legacy Drupal 6 platform that had reached the end of its road. Moving off it was the first job.
What I built
The work moved through three rough phases.
Rebuild. I audited the old platform, extracted the content cleanly, and rebuilt from scratch on a current stack using Laravel rather than a pre-built CMS.
Modernize. With the new foundation in place, I rewrote the publishing infrastructure: editorial approval workflows for a multi-author content team, a membership system, and payment integration tied through Salesforce so the conference, membership, and content products all spoke the same record-of-truth.
Compound. With a real platform underneath them, the org could push more weight into digital between events. The site stopped being a brochure for conferences and started being the connective tissue between them.
Why this engagement is on the list
An honest "modernization" project at a small-to-mid-size mission-driven org looks like this: the web platform was the visible deliverable, but the durable contribution was rebuilding the operational foundation under it. Approval workflows people could actually use. A membership database that didn't need a developer to run a query. Payment plumbing that didn't break on every Salesforce update.
No company is perfect, but they're trying is the line I came to working for SB. Many of the members are large enterprises that get critiqued from the outside as performative, and some of that critique is fair. From the inside, you also see the people fighting hard for incremental progress and the cost of that work. Both things are true. The platform we built was for them.