Modernizing A Mission-Critical Digital Estate, One Supported Platform At A Time
Race Forward, a leading U.S. nonprofit advancing racial justice, carries out its mission through a sprawling family of websites: from its flagship .org site and the Colorlines publication to the GARE racial-equity network and the Facing Race conference. That estate was built on aging, fragmented technology, including platforms past end-of-life.
Axelerant partnered with Race Forward as its direct integration and delivery partner to migrate the ecosystem onto a single, supported Drupal 11 foundation hosted on Eppihost, then stayed on through a continuous delivery and maintenance engagement to keep every property secure, accessible, and ready for what comes next, including modernized event management.
Race Forward's digital presence had grown organically over many years into a wide estate of sites built on different technologies and stitched together with third-party services. For a mission-driven organization with limited engineering capacity, this created real risk and friction. The engagement began by naming the most pressing pain points.
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 near 1.3 seconds, slowing supporters on their way to donate, register, or learn. The path forward had to prioritize a supported foundation, security, accessibility, and a sustainable way to keep improving without overstretching a nonprofit budget.
Axelerant approached the engagement as a direct delivery partner, no third-party vendors in between, with one guiding principle: every change should reduce risk, raise quality, and keep the platform sustainable for a mission-driven team.
Consolidation Onto A Supported Drupal 11 Foundation
Axelerant migrated 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.
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, with post-deployment sanity testing and a structured ticketing workflow to keep every site secure and stable.
Modernized Event Management
To support how Race Forward actually runs programs and conferences, Axelerant is extending 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.
AI-Assisted Discovery
As the relationship matured, Axelerant introduced AI into the discovery process, using AI-assisted workshops to accelerate requirements gathering, prioritization, and solution design, helping a lean team make confident decisions faster.
The engagement turned a fragile, fragmented estate into a single supported platform, and an ongoing partnership that keeps it healthy.
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
Six-plus 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 with post-deployment validation, making up to date and secure the normal state rather than a periodic scramble.
Project Highlights
Eliminating End-Of-Life Risk
The most urgent win was retiring unsupported Drupal 7 and WordPress in favor of a single Drupal 11 foundation on Eppihost. This closed a widening security gap, ended the technical debt of running past end-of-life software, and gave Race Forward one place to govern and improve instead of many to firefight.
Security-First Continuous Maintenance
With the CDM engagement, every property is kept current and stable through coordinated deployments, including the move to Drupal's latest stable security release, paired with post-deployment sanity testing and transparent ticket tracking. Maintenance became proactive and predictable rather than reactive.
Event Management That Fits How Teams Work
The event enhancements remove everyday friction for organizers: one event series instead of ten, a single promo running across the whole festival lineup, and a cleaner path from purchase to calendar for supporters. Small, high-leverage changes that compound across every campaign and conference.
AI-Assisted Discovery Workshops
By bringing AI into discovery, the team compressed the time from conversation to clear, prioritized requirements, helping a small organization scope and sequence work with greater confidence and less overhead.
Ask anything about how we ran Race Forward - or what it would look like for you.
Foyer is grounded in our own playbooks and the named work behind this record. Go deep on the methodology, the decisions, the team shape - or bring your own problem statement, use case, or intent and we'll talk it through against non-profit engagements.
Have a similar shape on your plate? We'll come back with how we'd run yours.
The Race Forward engagement moved 6+ properties onto one supported drupal 11 platform. If your situation rhymes, send us the brief and a named delivery lead will respond inside one business day.
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