Case Study: Truth Initiative (nonprofit) achieves scalable delivery of viral vaping-prevention campaigns with Platform.sh

Truth Initiative successfully delivers vaping prevention messages to young adults thanks to its scalable site capacity

Truth Initiative, a nonprofit that educates teens and young adults about the harms of smoking, vaping, and nicotine, needed to deploy updates faster and scale its Drupal 8 sites (truthinitiative.org and thetruth.com) to absorb sudden viral traffic spikes. To meet that challenge it chose Platform.sh’s software-based Platform-as-a-Service, which includes the Fastly CDN and native integrations with GitLab and other services.

Platform.sh enabled Truth Initiative to spin up production-like environments per feature branch, push code branches independently, and quickly scale site capacity during viral campaigns that drove millions of hits (campaign content reached more than 13.1 billion views across platforms). The Platform.sh solution also provided Fastly-powered Varnish caching and support for running Drupal 8 on PHP/MySQL alongside a Symfony/MongoDB backend, resulting in smoother migrations, fewer deployment disruptions, and faster, more reliable campaign launches.

Truth Initiative

Derrick Butts

Chief Information and Cybersecurity Officer