From Migration to Movement: Unifying Race Forward's Multi-Site Drupal Ecosystem

The Client

Race Forward is an American nonprofit dedicated to advancing racial justice through changes in policy, institutions, and culture. For decades it has helped organisations and communities catalyse movement toward a more just, multiracial democracy, with 45+ years catalysing racial justice, 11,000+ racial equity practitioners in its networks, and 400+ government jurisdictions advancing racial equity through its work.

Its mission reaches the public through a connected family of digital properties: the flagship RaceForward.org, home to donations and resource libraries; the award-winning Colorlines editorial publication; the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) network and its online community; the Facing Race conference microsite; and dedicated fundraising, action, and learning sites. Together they serve activists, public-sector leaders, funders, and everyday supporters.

The Situation

Race Forward needed a digital estate that could carry its mission securely and sustainably. But that estate had grown organically over many years into a wide set of sites built on different technologies and stitched together with third-party services. For a mission-driven organisation with limited engineering capacity, that created real risk and friction, and left no single foundation to build on.

The Challenge

• End-of-life platform risk. Parts of the ecosystem still ran on Drupal 7 and WordPress. As Drupal 7 reached official end-of-life in January 2025, those properties were unsupported, exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities and mounting technical debt with every passing month.
• A fragmented, multi-platform estate. Sites spread across WordPress and multiple Drupal versions, integrated with external tools for donations, events, community, and email. The inconsistency made every update slower, raised the cost of change, and left no single, governable foundation to build on.
• Performance and experience gaps. Real-user measurement showed key properties failing Core Web Vitals, with largest-contentful-paint around 3.2 seconds and server response (TTFB) near 1.3 seconds, slowing supporters on their way to donate, register, or learn.

The path forward had to prioritise a supported foundation, security, accessibility, and a sustainable way to keep improving without overstretching a nonprofit budget.

The Solution

1. A direct delivery partnership. Axelerant approached the engagement as a direct delivery partner, with no third-party vendors in between, guided by one principle: every change should reduce risk, raise quality, and keep the platform sustainable for a mission-driven team.
2. Consolidation onto a supported Drupal 11 foundation. Axelerant migrated the WordPress and Drupal 7 properties onto a unified Drupal 11 platform hosted on Eppihost. The migration followed a pragmatic, content-preserving approach designed to eliminate end-of-life risk quickly while protecting the content, structure, and audiences Race Forward had built over years.
3. A continuous delivery and maintenance engagement. Rather than treating launch as the finish line, the partnership was planned into an ongoing CDM model. Axelerant manages coordinated production deployments across properties, including moving sites to the latest stable Drupal security release (10.6.8), with post-deployment sanity testing and a structured ticketing workflow to keep every site secure and stable.
4. Modernized event management. To support how Race Forward actually runs programs and conferences, Axelerant will help extend the platform's event capabilities with practical, organizer-friendly features: recurring event series, longer event descriptions, promo codes that work across multiple events, an email-template coverage view, and a cleaner post-purchase "Add to Calendar" experience.
5. AI-assisted discovery. As the relationship matured, Axelerant introduced AI into the discovery process, using AI-assisted workshops to accelerate requirements gathering, prioritisation, and solution design, helping a lean team make confident decisions faster.

The Results

End-of-life risk eliminated. WordPress and Drupal 7 properties were migrated to a supported Drupal 11 foundation on Eppihost, eliminating the security exposure and technical debt associated with running past end-of-life software.

A unified, governable ecosystem. 6+ digital properties now share one platform backbone, replacing a patchwork of technologies with a consistent foundation that is faster and cheaper to maintain and extend.

Security kept current by default. Through the CDM engagement, properties are deployed onto the latest stable Drupal security release (10.6.8) with post-deployment validation, making "up to date and secure" the normal state rather than a periodic scramble.

• 6+ digital properties consolidated from WordPress and multiple Drupal versions onto a single Drupal 11 backbone.
• Drupal 7 and WordPress properties, previously past or approaching end-of-life, retired in favor of a supported foundation.
• Every property kept current on the latest stable Drupal security release (10.6.8) with post-deployment validation.