Case Study: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) achieves a resilient, high-performance website that handles massive traffic spikes with Pantheon

The ACLU Rises to Every Occasion with a Website that Doesn’t Fail

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which reaches millions of supporters through aclu.org for news, fundraising, and legal resources, was facing repeated slowdowns and outages as campaign-driven traffic surged. Legacy hosting and a Drupal search implementation strained under spikes—by the 2016 election cycle traffic jumped thousands of percent—revealing the need for a more scalable, agile infrastructure and development workflow.

The ACLU migrated aclu.org and 20+ affiliate sites to Pantheon, adopting Multidev, a custom Drupal upstream, and New Relic monitoring. Pantheon’s scalable hosting handled massive spikes (peaks reported up to 8,500% of normal traffic) with zero outages, enabling faster campaign launches, easier affiliate management, improved security and performance, and sustained donor engagement and conversions.

ACLU

Marco Carbone

Associate Director of IT