Going on the Record - An Inside Look at an Echidna Process

Each RFP we are invited to participate in starts a process. A ritual. We identify a solution, write the proposal, submit, and then… we wait. If we are awarded the RFP we ring a bell that is mounted to the wall outside the sales team work space.

Becoming a vendor of record also has its own process. This process - this ritual - is usually very long and it can take months before you get approved or declined. The effort to become a vendor of record is well worth it because that gets you one step closer to being able to sell products and services to a large group, municipality, or corporation, which can be lucrative. We don’t ring the bell when we join vendor of record agreements, but to us it’s as big of  accomplishment as winning an RFP.

The Washington Institutions Of Public Higher Education (WIPHE) is an interlocal cooperation agreement and the most recent relationship to which we have the privilege of belonging.

WIPHE is a highly successful collaboration among the two and four-year public institutions of higher education in the Washington area. Digital Echidna does a lot of business in the United States yet we only learned about WIPHE after being invited to bid by University of Washington. We responded to that competitive bid process and were ultimately successful, joining a contractor pool of other design and development resources. There are upwards of 100 schools that belong to WIPHE, all hoping to benefit by saving time, reducing overlapping efforts, and benefitting from group buying discounts and savings.

Digital Echidna was accepted on WIPHE’s vendor and subcontractors list based on the quality and timeliness of our work in Drupal and our experience in higher education.

It’s not easy to manage a university’s entire web presence. You have multiple departments, multiple disciplines, various levels of experience, and competing priorities and areas of focus. And you’ve got to manage all of these, while still adhering to your content strategy and being mindful of compliance issues, which can range from branding standards to accessibility requirements. Many universities require a tool that can handle these broad-spectrum requirements -- and because Drupal addresses these challenges, it is quickly becoming the top choice for higher education websites.

According to a recent statistic, 71 per cent of the top universities use Drupal -- a list that includes  MIT, University of Oxford, Stanford, and every Ivy League School. Drupal is popular with educational institutions because it provides a scalable, flexible platform capable of handling large amounts of content that can be tailored to the specific needs of individual schools and departments. It’s a highly accessible platform for developers who are building the website, and the faculty and students who use the website.

Now, I can’t tell you how many schools in the WIPHE collaborative use Drupal or even want to make the move to Drupal, but it's really exciting to see the impact Drupal is making in the world -- and even more so within the education sector as a whole.