Sector(s)
Team Members
Lions Clubs International (LCI) is one of the most well-known and active nonprofit organizations worldwide. For over 100 years, Lions Clubs have provided services and support to communities in more than 200 countries and geographic areas — from disaster relief and humanitarian aid to work fighting hunger and disease. Their Drupal website is a critical hub for member resources, donations, volunteer coordination, and telling the story of the organization to a global audience.
LCI came to Electric Citizen looking for a long-term Drupal support partner. Their prior offshore development team could technically maintain the site but lacked deep expertise in Drupal best practices, accessibility, and sustainable architecture. For several years now, EC has served as LCI's leading Drupal support partner, contributing across design, UX, front-end theming, and custom backend development — with the work continuously evolving to match LCI's changing needs.
About the project
Challenge
LCI had an offshore development team that could keep the site technically running, but lacked the deeper Drupal expertise needed for sustainable architecture, accessibility, performance, and modern best practices. LCI needed a trusted long-term partner — not just to fix what was broken, but to provide strategic consulting, contribute across disciplines (design, UX, front-end, backend), and help the marketing and communications team pursue new initiatives as the organization's needs evolved.
Solutions
Electric Citizen began the engagement with a detailed audit of the existing Drupal site — identifying gaps against best practices, accessibility concerns, and areas for improvement. We reviewed the findings with LCI's team and built a prioritized "backlog" of improvements to work through over time, balanced alongside the marcomm team's ongoing list of new initiatives.
Over several years, the work has covered a broad range:
- Site search improvements — ongoing tuning and enhancements to the site's Solr-based search, running against a self-hosted custom Solr server, to help members and visitors find the right content across a large multilingual content base.
- Member Resources hub redesign — a rebuilt Member Resources area to improve navigation and findability of the resources members come to LCI's site for.
- Spam protection — addressing persistent spam problems on donation and contact forms with a combination of technical and editorial fixes.
- Multilingual support — ongoing support for the site across all twelve of LCI's supported languages, including translation workflow and language-specific editorial concerns.
- Ongoing support and maintenance — keeping the Drupal core and contributed module ecosystem up to date, addressing security advisories, improving performance, and maintaining a stable platform for LCI's team.
Current initiatives (in progress)
Two larger initiatives are underway as of early 2026:
- DAM platform migration: WebDAM → Bynder. LCI is moving from WebDAM to Bynder as their digital asset management platform. The migration strategy currently in flight is: an initial data load from Bynder into Drupal via flat file (CSV); custom scripts to rewrite WebDAM URLs across existing nodes to their Bynder equivalents; and an ongoing sync via the Bynder API (with a scheduled flat-file export from Bynder consumed by a Drupal cron job as an alternative under evaluation). The final approach depends on LCI and Bynder finalizing data architecture and metadata field mapping between the two platforms.
- Visual redesign and site retheme. Alongside the DAM migration, LCI's site is undergoing a visual redesign and front-end retheme — modernizing the look and feel of the public-facing site while preserving the underlying content model and multilingual framework.
Outcomes
For several years now, Electric Citizen has served as the leading Drupal support partner for Lions Clubs International. Our team keeps the CMS maintained and updated, contributes improvements across disciplines, and actively partners with LCI's team on new initiatives. The relationship continues to grow as LCI's digital needs evolve — most recently expanding into a larger-scale platform migration and visual redesign that will shape the next phase of the site.
Why Drupal was chosen
LCI was already running on Drupal when Electric Citizen joined the engagement. The question wasn't whether to stay on Drupal — it was whether their existing Drupal site could be put on sustainable footing. Drupal continued to be the right platform for LCI for several reasons:
- Multilingual at scale — LCI's site serves members and the public in twelve languages. Drupal's core multilingual capabilities and mature translation workflow tools are well suited to running a single site across that many languages without fragmenting into parallel sites per language.
- Content scale and structure — A global nonprofit site spans member resources, giving/donations, program and cause pages, news, events, chapter finders, and more. Drupal's mature content modeling, taxonomy, and entity reference capabilities handle this kind of multi-audience content ecosystem cleanly.
- Editorial flexibility — LCI's marketing and communications team needed a CMS that let them create and update content without custom development for every new initiative. Drupal's component-based authoring model supports that.
- Accessibility — As a public-facing nonprofit serving a global audience with varying abilities 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, which means proven patterns for donations, volunteer engagement, and multi-program content — along with a strong community of contributed modules and accessible themes to build on.
- Open source and sustainability — No licensing costs, a large contributor community, and a clear long-term roadmap make Drupal a sustainable choice for an organization with a multi-decade horizon.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The defining characteristic of the LCI site is its scale and its multilingualism. Drupal's core multilingual modules — Content Translation, Configuration Translation, Interface Translation, and Language — provide the foundation for delivering content in twelve languages from a single site and single editorial workflow, rather than fragmenting into parallel sites per language. Pathauto and Redirect keep URLs consistent and manageable across that content volume.
Editorial flexibility is a second priority. Paragraphs, Layout Builder, and Media Library give LCI's marketing and communications team flexible, component-based pages and a centralized media library — the foundation for a marcomm team that's continuously launching new campaigns, programs, and initiatives without needing custom development for each one.
Site search has been an ongoing focus. Search API and Search API Solr, running against a self-hosted Solr server, power multilingual search across LCI's content base. Tuning and improving search has been a recurring workstream over the years as the content evolves.
As a high-traffic, high-visibility donation-driven nonprofit, forms and anti-spam are also a first-class concern. Webform powers donation, contact, and engagement forms, while Honeypot and CAPTCHA address the persistent spam pressure that comes with a public donation platform.
The Migrate suite has been used across multiple engagements with LCI — most recently as the scaffolding for the in-progress WebDAM-to-Bynder DAM migration, which includes an initial flat-file (CSV) data load, custom URL-rewrite scripts, and a scheduled-sync option under evaluation.
