Sector(s)
Team Members
UFCW Local 1189 represents more than 10,000 food and commercial workers across much of Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and North Dakota. The union's website is the primary hub for members — the place they go to find their worksite, check on active contract negotiations, learn about benefits, and get chapter news.
Electric Citizen was initially brought in to take over support and maintenance of the existing site. A few years into that partnership, it became clear that the underlying platform — an aging Drupal 7 install — needed more than incremental improvements. With Drupal 7's end-of-life approaching and the site's design and UX feeling dated, UFCW engaged Electric Citizen for a full migration to the latest version of Drupal, a redesign focused on member tasks, and a streamlined information architecture.
About the project
Challenge
The existing UFCW site had served the union well for years but had started to show its age. The design looked dated, the user experience had known issues, and the site was built on Drupal 7 — which needed to be upgraded to remain supported. The navigation had unclear labels, the worksite list was hampered by confusing and redundant filters, and content had accumulated over time in ways that obscured the member-focused purpose of the site. The campaign-era "Take Action!" pages were no longer reflective of current priorities. UFCW needed a partner who could migrate the site off Drupal 7 and at the same time refocus it around what members actually came to the site to do.
Solutions
Electric Citizen approached the project as three coordinated efforts: refocus, redesign, and technical migration.
On refocus, we started from member tasks. The most common reasons members visit the site are practical: find their worksite, check who to contact, and keep tabs on active contract negotiations. We redesigned the homepage around three clear actions — "Find Your Worksite," "Active Negotiations," and "Start a Union" (for prospective organizers) — and worked through the rest of the site with the same lens. The worksite list kept its table-based structure but gained a simple keyword search, replacing a set of confusing, redundant filters. Contract negotiation updates were consolidated onto each negotiation's own page, and outdated campaign content was replaced with a streamlined News section.
On redesign, we updated navigation labels based on analytics and member intent — "Where You Work" became "Find Your Worksite," "Negotiate!" became "Active Negotiations," "Members Only" became "Member Benefits." Small changes, but they make a real difference when members are trying to get somewhere quickly. On the visual side, we led a new design that leans into the union's human-centered mission, featuring prominent, easily updated imagery of members at work, organizing, and negotiating on each major landing page.
On technical migration, moving from Drupal 7 to the latest version required more than a lift-and-shift. We performed a full content and module audit — removing unused structures, consolidating content types, and migrating all media into Drupal's core Media library. The Migrate suite handled the bulk of the content transfer, minimizing manual work. Site search, including the new worksite keyword filter, is powered by Search API and Search API Solr for fast, reliable filtering across the worksite catalog.
Outcomes
The migrated site delivers members to their most common tasks quickly and clearly: "Find Your Worksite," "Active Negotiations," and "Member Benefits" are now front and center. The refreshed navigation, more human-focused imagery, and simplified worksite search have improved clarity and operational efficiency for both UFCW's editorial team and members using the site day-to-day. The union is also back on a fully supported version of Drupal with a cleaner, more maintainable content model built on best practices — positioning the site for long-term sustainability.
Why Drupal was chosen
UFCW was already running on Drupal 7 when the engagement began. The decision for the rebuild was whether to modernize on Drupal or migrate to a different platform entirely. Drupal continued to be the right choice for several reasons:
- Content scale and structure — A union site spans worksites, employers, negotiations, member benefits, news, and campaign pages. Drupal's mature content modeling, taxonomy, and entity reference capabilities handle this kind of structured, cross-referenced content cleanly.
- Editorial flexibility — UFCW's editorial team needed a CMS that let them update negotiation pages, worksite details, and benefits content without custom development. Drupal's component-based authoring model supports that.
- Continuity and familiarity — Staff were already comfortable with Drupal after years on the platform. Moving to modern Drupal preserved that institutional knowledge while delivering a dramatically better editorial and front-end experience.
- Accessibility — As a public-facing nonprofit serving working members across multiple states and devices, accessibility is essential. Drupal's accessibility-focused core and admin experience support sustained WCAG compliance.
- Sector fit — Drupal is widely adopted across nonprofits and mission-driven organizations, meaning proven patterns for member-facing content, news, and campaign pages — along with a strong community of contributed modules and accessible themes.
- Open source and sustainability — No licensing costs, a large contributor community, and a clear long-term roadmap make Drupal a sustainable choice for a long-running organization with a multi-decade horizon.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The heart of this project was a Drupal 7 upgrade that also gave us the opportunity to clean up and modernize how the site worked. The Migrate suite — including Migrate Plus and Migrate Tools — handled the bulk of the content transfer from Drupal 7, letting us migrate structured content programmatically while a full content and module audit ran in parallel to remove unused structures and consolidate content types. Media Library became the new home for all images and embedded assets, replacing the scattered media handling that had accumulated in the Drupal 7 site. Pathauto and Redirect protected SEO equity and inbound links through the migration.
A member-first information architecture meant editors needed tools that matched. Paragraphs and Layout Builder give UFCW's editorial team flexible, component-based pages and higher-level layout control — the foundation for landing pages that can feature prominent, easily updated imagery of members and for negotiation pages that consolidate related updates in one place.
The single most-used feature on the site is the worksite search. Search API and Search API Solr power a fast, keyword-driven worksite filter that replaces the confusing, redundant filters on the old site — a small-looking change that makes a real difference for members trying to find their own worksite. Metatag support SEO for a public-facing nonprofit site, and the Gin admin theme rounds things out with a cleaner, more accessible editing experience for UFCW staff managing the site day to day.
