JumpStart: Taking Nonprofits Further Faster

At a Glance

Capellic’s JumpStart is a Drupal-based project accelerator for nonprofits. It allows us to prioritize the unique aspects of your organization, its visitors, and how to serve and activate them. It gets your website built more quickly, durably, and intelligently.

Our team has decades of experience learning what works and doesn’t work for nonprofit content editors and digital teams. This learning is baked into JumpStart, creating a solid foundation from which to grow and adapt over time.

Here's what to know:

It prioritizes the content editor's experience
It prioritizes the uniqueness of your brand, goals, and audiences
It accelerates the website build process, allowing us to get to the unique aspects of your website faster and more cost effectively
It's built on open source technologies
It's all yours - you own it!

Why All Projects Deserve a JumpStart

The Content Editor's Experience Matters

Ease of Use

Use drag and drop components when composing content – no HTML knowledge required
Intuitive organization of content fields on content creation forms
ROT (Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial) content tagging and content hygiene tools
Central media library (images, files, YouTube videos)

Accessibility

Content accessibility tool, Editora11y, comes built in to check your content’s accessibility as it is added to the CMS
Add alt text to images; indicate images that are decorative

Manage and Update Global Elements

Evergreen copy, like footer disclaimers or email acquisition promotions, is managed and updated in one place
Includes global components that can be used throughout the website, like newsletter promos, but only have to be edited once, in one place

It's Your Brand, Your Experience, Your Content

100% your brand: We fully customize JumpStart to reflect your brand and user experience goals. Colors, fonts, layouts, and other visual design treatments are all adjustable and bespoke to your needs.
Protects your brand (and Your User Experience): JumpStart’s component- and template-based architecture protects your brand by creating a system that keeps your colors, fonts, designs, and UX consistent page to page.
Content Architecture Specific to Your Organization: JumpStart is designed to adapt to the specific content needs of your organization and audiences. It ships with menus common for most nonprofit websites, but can be easily edited and extended as your content grows.
You’re Not Limited: JumpStart’s primary purpose is to get to the good stuff faster and spend the most time on what makes you, your mission, and your site’s visitors unique. JumpStart is a starting point and can go any direction it needs to go to meet your specific needs.

You Should Own It

JumpStart extends the Drupal open source content management system and does not include proprietary code. This means that you own it 100%, and always will.

Every Dollar Matters

Capellic and its team have worked specifically with nonprofits for decades. We know that each dollar matters and created JumpStart so our nonprofit clients get more out of their investment.

No fees: There are no “initiation” or licensing fees associated with using JumpStart.
It reduces costs: JumpStart allows our team to move more quickly. As a result, the cost of building out your organization’s unique site takes less time to create an experience unique to your organization and its visitors.

A Solid Technical Foundation Should Be Expected

Open Source: JumpStart is based on modern Drupal and leverages contributed modules as much as possible to reduce the total cost of ownership. Capellic has not added proprietary code or modules. Clients are in full control of their website.
Durability: Our clients are buying Drupal and our ability to extend it to accommodate their content strategy. As such we endeavor to stick close to core, which is to say we look to Drupal’s core capabilities first, the contributed module space second, and then write code when a suitable solution is otherwise not achievable. This strategy maximizes ROI because their website is built in a way that is understood and recognizable by the Drupal community at large. This approach is informed by the rule of least power, we only adopt technology needed to achieve the goals of the organization. To do otherwise diminishes ROI by sacrificing durability.
Back-end to Front-end: JumpStart uses modern, performant front-end technologies such as Tailwind CSS, Storybook, and Alpine.js. We use Storybook and atomic design methodology to organize our modular UI components, which adheres to Drupal’s preferred method of entity to design mapping via Single Directory Components (SDC). Drupal entities, such as Blocks, Content Components, and Paragraphs, are mapped to Storybook components.
Performance: JumpStart is built with performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices on Google PageSpeed Insights at its core. It has zero errors in WAVE, Sa11y, and Axe DevTools, three popular automated accessibility analyzers. We leverage Drupal’s caching layer and selectively clear page cache when content is updated. Users are served static pages close to their location using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Host anywhere: While Capellic prefers deploying JumpStart to Pantheon and Acquia due to our proficiency with those platforms, JumpStart can be deployed to any server that supports Drupal.

JumpStart-Powered

In addition to our own website, here are a couple of other sites that used JumpStart as the starting point.

Easterseals and 35+ Affiliates

Screenshots of the Easterseals website — Check Easterseals out at https://easterseals.com.

More on Easterseals: