In 2016 the Audre Lorde Project, one of Palante Technology Cooperative's first and longest-standing clients, needed to upgrade their now end-of-life Drupal 6 site to a modern platform. The new site needed to contain all the content from their previous site but with a new responsive design, improved functionality, and greater ease-of-use for the busy organizers and nonprofit staff who would use the site to provide updates and information on ALP's programs, events, organizing work and resources for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non Conforming (LGBTSTGNC) People of Color communities in and around New York City. The new site also needed to integrate well with CiviCRM, the open source constituent relationship management (CRM) that ALP uses to engage with its members, allies and supporters. Last but not least, all of this needed to fit into a limited nonprofit budget!
Palante was lucky to work with ALP to develop this new website to serve queer and trans communities of color in NYC. ALP not only trusted Palante's recommendation of the then-quite-new Backdrop over other much more established content management systems like WordPress, but in the spirit of both mutual aid and open source they also partially sponsored Palante's work to port the Webform CiviCRM module to Backdrop. Palante adapted the website design provided by designer Steven Garcia into a responsive theme that accommodated the site's content and functionality needs.
Backdrop hit a sweet spot at the intersection of a number of ALP's project requirements: a relatively easy migration from their current Drupal 6 site; fully-fledged integration with their existing CiviCRM instance; better usability for content editors and other site users; and affordability, both during the initial site build and for the rest of the site's existence. After a demo of a Backdrop installation and a chance to experiment with the sandbox site themselves, ALP was sold on the much-improved out-of-the-box functionality and usability of Backdrop core. In turn, those core improvements helped reduce the project budget and allowed Palante to focus on the more tailor-made aspects of ALP's site.
