Closer to Truth

In early 2013, the broadcast series Closer to Truth, which airs on PBS stations across the nation, received a new media marketing grant to build a revitalized website for their users. Although experts at communicating science for broadcast and documentary films, the Closer to Truth team knew they’d need help with the design and technical aspects of undergoing a website development project. They engaged design agency Behavior to publish their vast quantity of content on a quality site without any hiccups. Behavior recommended Pantheon to help do just that.

The goal was to transform the digital experience for our users. The taxonomy of our content is daunting and targets a very discriminating audience. Pantheon helps us manage this big effort.

Peter Getzels, Co-Creator & Executive Producer, Closer to Truth

All of the Content! (Choosing Drupal)

Hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Closer to Truth features interviews with experts such as George F. R. Ellis, Raymond Kurzweil, and Deepak Chopra, Closer to Truth serves as a hub of information on all things cosmos, consciousness and meaning. The new site needed to handle an incredible amount of content—increasing engagement and attracting more visitors—without the threat of performance issues.

“We have upwards of 4,000 videos under the hood,” said Steven Kostant, Executive Marketing Strategist at Closer to Truth. “We’re continually creating new shows and also sharing in depth interviews on the site. Scalability is incredibly important to us.”

The older version of the Closer to Truth website ran on a homegrown content management system, a system that simply wasn’t flexible enough for the site to grow on. They needed a new content strategy with contributors and the ability to organize the content with ongoing editors, content curators, and authenticated users. They also needed a solution that could easily manage their vast amount of content. They turned to the open source community for insight, and ultimately decided Drupal could best meet their needs.

A New Workflow

Before Pantheon, Closer to Truth used a basic web host for their site. The workflow for making updates to the site was daunting and difficult, and maintenance required a lot of time and resources.

“These people are video producers—not web developers,” said Jeff Piazza, Behavior Co-Founder, referring to the Closer to Truth digital team. “We took to heart that there would be challenges finding people to maintain and enhance the website, let alone the infrastructure, after we finished the project. We try to get clients to embrace a workflow. In this case, they’d never made a production site before, so we wanted something that was easy to train them on and hand off.”

The Challenge

The ability for Behavior to hand the project off to the Closer to Truth team after completion was key in choosing a website management platform. Both teams spent time talking amongst the Drupal community and heard great things about Pantheon.

“Pantheon was highly recommended as a scalable solution with great Drupal awareness,” explained Sang Lee, Technical Lead at Behavior. “We were assured that the platform would facilitate a seamless handoff after project completion.”

For Behavior, Pantheon helped mitigate the risk of server issues delaying deployment. “That was a huge sell for us,” Piazza said. “What is the scale of maintaining the project? How do we match the expectations of the project? What are the potential roadblocks? These are all things we think about as an agency, and we felt Pantheon could certainly help in that effort.”

A Smooth Launch

The entire project was completed in just three months, and launched seamlessly. The site now hosts 13 seasons worth of interviews and boasts a whopping 300,000 minutes of video views a month.  

Closer to Truth makes use of Pantheon’s development workflow in-house, bringing Behavior in as needed. “We continue to work together holistically on new changes, using Git to branch and merge on Pantheon.” Lee said. “We’re saving a great deal of time not having to manage infrastructure.”

Pantheon did everything we needed quite well.

Peter Getzels

Looking Ahead

Now that Closer to Truth doesn’t have to worry about spending time on infrastructure, and remains confident in their ability to scale, they have their sights set on growing the broadcast series, online educational courseware, and the website. They plan to create more content, videos, graphics, educational courses, and new assets to ensure that Closer to Truth remains the definitive resource for Cosmos, Consciousness, and Meaning.

“Flexibility is important to us for these upcoming phases,” Getzels said. “We’ve built it and the audience is coming. Now we want more visitors, more interaction on the site. It’s an ongoing endeavor where content will be supported through the backend as well as in the UX. Pantheon affords us the time to work on these things.”