Emerge Interactive is proud to join with our partners at Hot Studio in announcing the launch of the new website for the United Religions Initiative (URI)—www.uri.org.

Founded in 2000, URI is a nonprofit peace-building and interfaith organization dedicated to promoting enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, and works around world to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing. Emerge was pleased to provide a substantial portion of their work to URI in the form of a $15,000 in-kind donation as a part of Emerge’s ongoing effort to support non-profit organizations which help others and make our world a better place.

At the heart of URI is an ever-expanding network of local and virtual groups-called Cooperation Circles-working on local issues and putting into practice URI’s vision of interfaith peace-building and cooperation. Launched with 83 Cooperation Circles (CCs) in 30 countries, URI has grown to include more than 470 CCs in 75 countries and nearly half a million members. As they approached their 10th anniversary, URI knew their existing site had not only failed to keep up with the organization’s phenomenal growth, but was also not facilitating the needs of Cooperation Circles-as well as the global organization-to communicate their activities and key initiatives in ways that could build awareness, engage and inspire new audiences and attract new generations of members and donors.

The solution that Emerge developed with Hot Studio was to empower URI members around the world to become content creators, decentralizing as much of the website as possible. Each of the 470+ Cooperation Circles around the world has a page on the new website, and can share their activities through blogging, online forums and events. Content creation and sharing are seamlessly integrated into almost all aspects of the site, dramatically demonstrating the organization’s reach and influence, while at the same time greatly enhancing the power of individual members and groups to communicate and encourage participation in their activities by people from all around the world.

Emerge Interactive provided technical engineering and consultation for the integration and customization of their WebActive^™Enterprise-class Content Management System (CMS), which allows the URI staff to easily make changes and updates to the content of their site in minutes, as well as easily manage the accounts and contributions of Cooperation Circles, Regional Offices, Trustees, President’s Council members and volunteers. WebActive’s multi-lingual support is used to provide limited content in Arabic, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and Urdu, with a seamless upgrade to full-featured multi-lingual capabilities whenever required. Close cooperation between Emerge, Hot Studio and URI throughout the Strategic, Design, Build and Launch phases ensured a final site that exceeded URI’s expectations and flawlessly executed Hot Studio’s designs.