Africare is a leading US non-profit working to improve the lives of the people in Africa. Founded in 1970, and now employing over 1,200 people in 17 African countries, their international staff need to communicate and work together efficiently.

During a recent revamp of their public-facing website, they realized that moving the site over to the WordPress platform presented an opportunity to incorporate new knowledge management systems for staff and donors – right into their web presence at africare.org.

“We had already moved over to cloud solutions such as Google Apps for email,” explains Brent Stewart, who works in Africare’s Washington D.C. headquarters as Manager of Communications. “But especially for field workers in remote locations where internet access is limited, we still needed to simplify things further and ensure information is stored and shared in a highly structured way.”

Africare knew how versatile WordPress can be, and how easily it can be used for public websites as well as ‘intranets’. But there was one worrying question: were they streamlining processes or just adding yet another tool for which staff had to remember a new username and password?

Brent continues: “Our low overhead means we have lean offices, and inefficiencies like administering hundreds of users on multiple software systems are not acceptable. Our IT department was driving towards Single Sign-On based around Google Apps, and our WordPress project could fail if it further complicated processes, like new employee on-boarding, for our staff in D.C. and in the field.”

“Luckily, there was already a solution available to marry Google Apps and WordPress. When we learnt more about the leading Google Apps Login for WordPress plugin, we knew their premium and enterprise versions offered the exact tool we needed for our project.”

In the corner of Africare’s public website, which is in itself a useful resource for staff, they added a simple “Africare Staff Login” button which takes their staff members straight into the staff intranet – in just one click if they are already logged into Gmail.

On day one, new employees are given a Gmail account, so they are immediately able to dive straight into the knowledgebase that drives the whole organization.

“We chose WP-Glogin not only because the product offers perfect functionality for a Google Apps organization running a WordPress site, but also because their knowledgeable developers, who took an immediate interest in our project, generously and expertly answered all our questions. With their help, the decision to use WP-Glogin and the installation itself were easy.”

Africare uses Google Apps Login along with standard WordPress features such as pages and user roles to secure the knowledge management portion of their site.

To find out more about Africare, including how you can help their mission, please see their website: www.africare.org.

To find out more about our Google Apps plugins for WordPress, including Login and Drive functionality, please explore wp-glogin.com.