Ford Drive 4UR School/Community

The Ford Drive 4UR School/Community program has been a very successful tool for Ford Motor Company to get new drivers behind the wheels of Ford vehicles for years. Drive 4 UR School/Community is a test-drive program where a Ford dealership and a local school or community organization work together to raise up to $6,000, with each test-drive collecting a $20 donation for the participating school or community organization.

In 2018 I was tasked with taking over the technical oversight of this website for the program. The website had been developed by a 3rd party vendor and was having performance issues as the program grew larger with more dealerships, schools and community organizations joining every year. The original website was developed on an older version of Drupal CMS. It badly needed an upgrade and a functionality/error logging audit. Initially, we were able to mitigate some performance issues through bug fixes like properly closing database connections to free up resources, adding necessary try-catch blocks, error handling to fail gracefully, etc. However, these efforts still did not get us to the performance benchmarks we were looking for, so we made the decision to rebuild the website from the ground up.

Luckily, our agency program managers had extensive knowledge of the business rules and requirements for the website. We worked closely with them to ensure all functionality necessary for the program was rebuilt to their specifications, including a fully updated and improved program administration interface our program managers could use to assist dealerships, schools and community organizations that had signed up for the program.

Additionally, I thought that I would add in a few of the short 30 second ads that some amazingly talented creative people at the agency created to promote the program below. Enjoy!