Social Research Foundation

South Africa’s Social Research Foundation tracks public sentiment through rigorous polling. They're now backed by a Plone-powered platform that helps them publish faster, clearer, and with greater impact.

Background

The Social Research Foundation runs one of South Africa’s most trusted opinion polling operations. Their mission is to deliver regular, statistically sound insights into public sentiment—especially during high-stakes election periods. But turning data into public-facing reports was slow and labour-intensive, often taking days from spreadsheet to publish.

Visit the site at srfreports.co.za

Why Plone

To provide instantly available reports on their website, SRF needed a solution that was secure, future-proof, and tailored to the way they work.

Plone offered the stability of a proven CMS, paired with the flexibility to build highly structured, custom functionality. Juizi used Plone 6 Classic to create a publishing system that could do the heavy lifting.

Project goals and highlights

  • Instant report generation: Editors can upload CSVs and generate styled, interactive reports in minutes. No need to send files to a designer.

  • Structured data import: The backend processes polling data into consistent, accessible formats. Charts are rendered automatically.

  • No formatting required: The site applies standard layouts and branding on its own, saving time and avoiding inconsistency.

  • Editor-first workflow: A custom interface makes it easy to correct errors or update published reports without developer intervention.

Outcomes

The Social Research Foundation's 2024 national elections tracking poll provided the MOST ACCURATE results prediction. Its average deviation was within 1.1% of the final election results. -- DailyInvestor.com, 3 June 2024

  • Gabriel Makin from SRF summarised the importance of the project like this: “The most important aspect of polling is the provision of information about where a country's political system is at any given point.”

  • Reports now go live within hours of data collection.

  • The site makes raw data available alongside styled summaries—improving transparency and public trust.

  • The SRF team can publish directly, without relying on designers or devs.

Provider: Juizi, South Africa

The site was developed by Juizi, a South African web company with over 15 years’ experience building content-rich, editor-friendly websites for non-profits, research organisations, and membership-based institutions. Juizi's work focuses on helping organisations structure content in a way that supports long-term growth and editorial independence.

Juizi is very involved in the Plone community. Employees contribute to open source projects, speak regularly at international Plone Conferences and World Plone Day, and serve as Plone Foundation members, and serve on Plone teams.