Rescue Mission Alliance Websites

The Rescue Mission Alliance has served the homeless since 1972. It has grown from the first location on 6th Street in Oxnard to multiple locations in four counties throughout Southern California. These include the Ventura County Rescue Mission, San Fernando Valley Rescue Mission, Valley Food Bank, Central Coast Rescue Mission, and the Victor Valley Rescue Mission.

The work that they do is a valuable community resource, one that requires the focus of staff and volunteers (in some capacity) almost 24 hours a day, every day of the year. So each Mission benefits greatly from operating their website inside a multisite network using WordPress, which centralizes the CMS’ core, theme and plugin management and maintenance.

A WordPress Multisite website can also publish its own content and make adjustments to its own themes, plugins and settings. This makes it really easy for RMA locations to publish content that reflects their specific strengths, outreach efforts and happenings in their community. And they can do all of this without having to worry about any of the upkeep of the CMS itself.

We setup each website in the network to represent the central integrity, non-profit bonifides and unified vision of the RMA. Custom CSS and individual site settings differentiate the websites visually via a unified color pallet and UI; while at the same time their typography, buttons, modals and other components are consistent across the network. At the same time we automated some of the processes around organizing volunteers, newsletter sign-ups, job postings, food drives and donation collection for each location.

In addition to a newsletter, each location also runs Campaigns; tailoring a call to action that’s seasonal or specific to the community’s needs. To reduce friction around creating campaigns, we extended RMA’s theme to support campaign components in several ways. A custom post-type and taxonomy for one, augmented by custom fields and metadata to accommodate custom links and rich media content. We designed and developed a system that can quickly generate a hero section on the home page, a call to action in the sidebar on the donations page, AND a dedicated landing page. These can be leveraged further via email and social media campaigns, generating interest in helping RMA reach it’s goals in a really organic and grass-roots way.