Nonprofit Drupal Support from Design to Maintenance
Giant Rabbit’s nonprofit Drupal support spans design, development, managed hosting, and maintenance. 20+ years’ expertise meeting nonprofit technology needs.
Giant Rabbit has spent over two decades building and supporting nonprofit websites, and Drupal is one of the platforms we know best.
Whether you’re launching a new Drupal site, maintaining an existing one, or trying to figure out if Drupal is even the right platform, 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:
We help with Drupal, from platform selection to website maintenance
We’ve been working with Drupal since the days of Drupal 5, so we’ve got firsthand familiarity with the highs and the lows: how stable and efficient a well-crafted Drupal site can be, and also how clunky, arcane, and unstable they can be when they’re over-built and out-of-date. Wherever you are on that spectrum, or if you’re just in the early days of considering the platform, we can help. We tailor our work to your specific needs, and our nonexhaustive list of nonprofit Drupal support and consulting services includes:
Selection
If you’re weighing whether Drupal is the right platform for your nonprofit, or whether your existing Drupal site still meets your needs, we’re ready to help. We’re platform-agnostic, so we’ll give you an honest assessment rather than a sales pitch.
Drupal tends to be a strong fit for nonprofits whose websites do more than just display content. If your site has complex features, or if users log in to custom profiles with layered permissions, or if the content in your site needs to work more like a database (with fielded data, relationships, complex search, and reporting), Drupal provides a solid foundation. On the other hand, if your site is just for showing web pages to anonymous visitors, and it mostly just does website things, Drupal may be more CMS than you need.
Visually, Drupal is great at providing consistency, even across complex content types or templated sub-sections. If you have a large amount of content and want to control the layout for continuity, Drupal shines. On the other hand, if you’d like page-building flexibility, to spin up new landing pages on the fly with unique layouts, or just to build out sections of your site without code, Drupal isn’t a great choice, and you’ll be better off with a CMS like WordPress that focuses more on the content-building experience.
This is not a decision you need to make on your own! It’s part of our process to help you evaluate your options, taking into account the full range of considerations (like your preferences and experience, long-term costs, etc.). We can find the CMS that’s right for you, and if it’s Drupal, we’ll help you play to the platform’s strengths.
Migration
Moving to a new digital home online can be overwhelming, but a clear strategy and a little help can go a long way. From the very first stages of our planning, we’ll be talking about how your content should be transformed and updated on its way to your new home, and what can be quietly left behind.
We’ll bring a mix of automated migrations for structured content (like old blog posts), combined with manually rebuilding key pages that make the most of your new site tools. We’ll ensure that the key pages on your new site look great, without getting bogged down in the past. (And of course, we’ll keep an eye on search rankings, to make sure you don’t lose any valuable pages in the move.)
Design
What Drupal’s page building lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in consistency. When we’re building a new Drupal site, we’ll lead a flexible design process to develop a visual identity for your site. 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 you’re looking for a full rebrand or a focused refresh, rather than selling a fixed package.
Development
Our developers ask the “why” behind every feature rather than building for novelty. Every line of code we write on a Drupal site is peer-reviewed, and we follow Drupal-specific best practices to keep your codebase stable, efficient to support, and flexible for whatever your organization needs to create next.
For Drupal in particular, to make the most of its consistency, we usually construct your pages with modular building blocks that are easy for your team to use in page-building site-wide. We build projects to last, in part because we’re usually the ones maintaining them for years afterward.
Managed hosting
Good hosting is critical for a Drupal site to keep pages snappy and responsive for your users and keep the lights on even when bots are swarming. To ensure your Drupal site stays up and accessible for you and your users, we offer managed hosting with a dedicated server tuned to your specific needs.
Our managed hosting features a unique distributed infrastructure: you’ll directly own your own AWS or DigitalOcean account, 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 there’s nothing to transfer if you decide to move on.
Security
Drupal’s security fundamentals are already solid, and our standard server setup and ongoing maintenance make them even better. We’ll maintain your Drupal website and keep it safe from malicious bots and hackers. Drupal, like any actively developed platform, regularly releases updates and security patches, and every Drupal module on your site will do the same. When a vulnerability in any piece of software on your server is disclosed, a Giant Rabbit developer evaluates it for your specific setup and applies the update right away if it’s urgent.
We also run nightly backups, continuously monitor your site’s uptime, and keep your site in version control so we can apply changes with confidence and roll back if anything goes awry.
Integrations
Integrations are one of Drupal’s key strengths. Drupal’s clear internal data structures and API mean that it works well either as one of many nodes in your organization’s data infrastructure, or even sometimes the central repository and database of record. Either way, Drupal is designed to work well with other platforms, whether through a pre-existing module, a custom integration, or a third-party service. We’ve integrated Drupal with Salesforce, QuickBooks, iMIS, Cvent, Mailchimp, Moodle, Higher Logic, Action Network, HubSpot, EveryAction, Bloomerang, Neon CRM, Insightly, CiviCRM, and more.
Drupal Commerce
If your nonprofit sells merchandise, memberships, or digital content, Drupal Commerce lets you build a store directly into your existing Drupal site rather than bolting on a separate platform. Because it’s built into Drupal, your store shares the same content management system and look and feel as the rest of your site, along with Drupal’s permissions, media library, and content types. We can help you set up, customize, or maintain a Drupal Commerce store, and connect it to your CRM, accounting software, or any other systems your team relies on.
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?
Drupal’s content structure can do a lot, so we spend real time training your team on the parts they’ll touch, like adding pages, managing media, and updating the content types you use on your site, rather than getting into every capability Drupal 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 Drupal support FAQs
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Ready to get started with nonprofit Drupal support?
Whether you already have a Drupal site or are thinking about getting started with one, we’re here to help.