Case Study: City Year boosts digital engagement and scales corps recruitment with Acquia

City Year Turns to Acquia, Drupal, to Digitally Engage with Students and Corps Members Around the World

City Year is an education-focused nonprofit that places City Year AmeriCorps members in high-need public schools to support attendance, behavior, and coursework; it currently deploys 2,800 corps members across more than 250 schools in 25 U.S. cities. Facing a decade-old, inflexible Ektron website and a pressing need to recruit, inform, and support local teams, City Year needed a scalable, user-focused digital platform that could deliver localized content, improve engagement, and help address shockingly high dropout rates in high-poverty communities.

City Year partnered with VML to build a new site on Drupal and adopted Acquia Cloud for hosting and scalability, using a mix of native and custom Drupal applications to enable multi-device delivery and decentralized content workflows. The new platform let non-developers publish quickly, paved the way for Marketo and Salesforce integration, and supports City Year’s expansion goals—from 25 to 38 cities and from 2,800 to 12,000 corps members—positioning the organization to reach far more students and help raise graduation rates.

City Year

Namrata Patel

Director of Digital Marketing, City Year