Nonprofit Backdrop CMS Consulting from Selection to Hosting

Get nonprofit Backdrop CMS consulting built for your goals and budget. Giant Rabbit covers migrations, design, development, hosting, maintenance, and support.

Giant Rabbit has spent over two decades building and supporting nonprofit websites, and Backdrop CMS is one of the platforms we know best.

Whether you’re weighing Backdrop against other platforms, migrating from an aging Drupal 7 site, or need help maintaining a Backdrop site you already love, our team works with yours to build a plan that fits your content, capacity, and goals.

With over 400 nonprofits served and more than 100 active clients, we know how to find the right solution for your team, operations, and budget. We help organizations across a variety of sectors, including:

Arts & Culture

Association & Career Development

Education

Environmental & Preservation

Healthcare, Wellness, & Public Safety

Human Rights & Social Justice

Legal Aid

Technology, Digital Rights, & Open Knowledge

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We handle nonprofit Backdrop CMS consulting, from platform selection to ongoing support

We love Backdrop CMS because of its nonprofit-friendly philosophy, which emphasizes security, stability, and backwards compatibility. Our nonprofit Backdrop CMS consulting services include:

Selection

If you’re weighing whether Backdrop is the right platform for your nonprofit, we’re ready to help. We’re platform-agnostic, so we’ll give you an honest assessment rather than a sales pitch.

Backdrop tends to be a strong fit for nonprofits seeking the technical stability of Drupal 7, paired with a focus on stability, security, and longevity. Backdrop CMS is made to respect the technical and budgetary constraints of nonprofits, while still providing a sturdy, extensible CMS.

Many nonprofits looking to upgrade their Drupal 7 sites without completely rebuilding for Modern Drupal choose Backdrop because it offers a direct upgrade path, and usually a lot less developer time. If you’re considering Backdrop, we’ll help you think through your organization’s content needs, technical capacity, and budget, and we’ll tell you plainly if Backdrop is a good fit.

Migration

If you’re moving to Backdrop from another platform, we’ll help you create the right content types and tagging structure, then script an automated import for any structured content (blog posts, store items, etc.).

If you’re coming from Drupal 7, you’re in luck—one of the big advantages of a Backdrop migration is that many data structures stay the same, so you won’t need to do a content migration as such. Either way, we’ll assess what’s on your current site, plan how it maps onto Backdrop, then carefully migrate, test, and launch, so your site’s content and search rankings come through intact.

Design

Backdrop, like Drupal, offers us a lot of flexibility with design. Our design and development go hand in hand, so what we design is built with your CMS and your team’s workflow in mind. We begin with discovery to understand your goals, audience, and story, then build a shared design vocabulary before creating a site that’s striking, user-focused, and uniquely yours. We scope design work around your needs, whether that’s a full rebrand or a focused refresh.

Development

Once it comes to building, our developers know Backdrop inside and out (in fact, a number of key Backdrop modules, such as the Salesforce integration and Drupal Commerce, were ported by our team and are currently maintained by them).

We’ll help you get the most out of the platform, and our code will stand the test of time. Every line of code we write on a Backdrop site is peer-reviewed, efficient to support, and flexible for whatever your organization needs to build next.

Managed hosting

Good hosting is critical for a Backdrop site to keep pages responsive for your users and keep the lights on even when bots are swarming. We offer managed hosting for Backdrop sites with a dedicated server tuned to your site’s specific needs. Our managed hosting features a unique distributed infrastructure: you’ll own your AWS or DigitalOcean account directly, and we’ll manage it on your behalf. We don’t mark up your server costs in any way (and we’ll help you line up nonprofit discounts), so we can tune the server exactly to your needs. Also, because the server is yours, you can grant access to anyone you like, and your infrastructure is yours if you ever move on.

Security

We can maintain your Backdrop website and keep it safe from malicious bots and hackers. Long-term platform stability and backwards compatibility are core Backdrop values, so platform updates tend to be relatively infrequent and routine.

Even so, there are occasional security releases for Backdrop core, as well as updates to the modules your site relies on. When a vulnerability is disclosed, a Giant Rabbit developer evaluates it for your specific setup and applies it right away if it’s urgent. We also run nightly backups, continuously monitor your site’s uptime, and keep your website in version control so we can apply changes with confidence and roll back if something goes awry.

Backdrop Commerce

If your nonprofit sells merchandise, memberships, or digital content, Backdrop Commerce lets you build a store directly into your existing Backdrop site rather than bolting on a separate platform. Backdrop Commerce is a port of Drupal Commerce built for the Backdrop community. We ported the module ourselves, and we’re the current maintainers, so it’s safe to say we know it well! We can help you set up, customize, or maintain a Backdrop Commerce store, and connect it to your CRM, accounting software, or any other systems your team relies on.

Backdrop CMS & CiviCRM

If you are interested in CiviCRM but you can’t or don’t want to integrate it with your current website, we often recommend Backdrop as a CMS for a standalone CiviCRM instance. Backdrop gives you the front-end flexibility of a powerful form-builder and flexible template engine, without the technical weight of a Drupal site, and with stronger internals than you’d get from WordPress.

Clear communication before, during, and after

Whatever your project may be, we want to help bring your nonprofit’s staff along with us. You may know exactly what needs improvement, or not, we’re here to help either way. We work with your team to understand where your current systems and workflows are falling short and chart a clear path forward. We then make recommendations that align with your organization’s goals and budget. Once we’ve confirmed the plan, we get to work, with plenty of check-ins built into the process.

One of the most important steps we take is helping your team acclimate to the changes we make. After all, what good is a new or improved site if no one on your team feels confident updating it? We focus training on the parts of Backdrop your staff will actually touch, adding pages, managing media, and updating the content types specific to your site, rather than every capability the platform offers. Our work is geared toward sustainability, and part of that is setting your staff up for long-term success. We lead training demos and walk through everything that’s new in plain language, so your team can navigate your new and improved site with confidence.

Nonprofit Backdrop CMS consulting FAQs

What is Backdrop CMS, and how is it different from Drupal?

Backdrop started as a fork of Drupal 7, created by developers who wanted to preserve that version’s approach to content and site-building after Drupal moved in a more complex, enterprise-focused direction. Backdrop has continued to develop on its own since then, aimed at organizations that want a flexible, sustainable CMS without the overhead that can come with the rapid pace and breaking changes of Modern Drupal development.

It tends to be a strong fit for nonprofits in particular, since most nonprofits don’t want to rebuild their websites every few years, and would prefer that their technology investments stick around.

Can you help with an existing Backdrop site, or do you only build new ones?

We do both. If you’ve already got a Backdrop site that isn’t working the way you’d like because of outdated design, a confusing content structure, or a setup nobody fully understands anymore, we’ll go through a technical onboarding process, get to know your setup, and take care of it as if we’d built it ourselves. We’re also well-versed in designing and developing sites from scratch.

We have an aging Drupal 7 site. Why might we consider moving to Backdrop instead of upgrading to the newest version of Drupal?

Drupal 7 no longer receives official security updates, which means an increasing amount of risk for websites still using the platform. Also, there’s no direct upgrade path from Drupal 7 to Modern Drupal, so sticking with Drupal requires a full rebuild.

A migration to Backdrop is the only Drupal 7 upgrade option that works as an upgrade-in-place, avoiding the need for a content migration. There’s still work to be done (your Drupal 7 theme may need to be rebuilt for Backdrop, for instance), but Backdrop is often a lighter lift than a move to a different platform altogether. The right call for your team depends on your specific site, and we’re glad to walk through the trade-offs with you.

Do you provide support after our Backdrop project launches?

Yes. If we build your site, it will already be set up in our ecosystem and ready for ongoing support. If you’re coming to us with an existing Backdrop site, we’ll do a thorough onboarding process so we can support it just as carefully. Either way, we handle security updates, backups, and hands-on help whenever you need it with no monthly retainers.

How would you describe Giant Rabbit’s Backdrop expertise?

As we were looking for alternatives to Drupal 7, Backdrop CMS became a core part of our offerings. We’ve managed complex, large-scale Drupal-to-Backdrop migrations, and we’ve also handled smaller, lighter-weight migrations, and we’ve maintained each of those sites in the years since. We’ve ported major Drupal modules to Backdrop, and we’re the maintainer of record for Backdrop Commerce, the Salesforce integration, Webform Rules, and other modules.

As an agency, we strongly support the Backdrop CMS philosophy, and we feel that the platform’s principles, as well as its solid technology, make it a safe bet for nonprofits that just want their technology to work without a lot of drama.

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Ready to get started with nonprofit Backdrop CMS consulting?

Whether you already have a Backdrop site or are thinking about getting started with one, we’re here to help.

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