Northern Rhode Island Conservation District · RFP Response

Website Redesign — built before the bid.

A working pilot is live today. Reviewers can try the site, edit in the CMS, and verify accessibility before reading a single page of this proposal.

$17,500 FIXED FEE 8 WEEKS TO LAUNCH WORKING PILOT INCLUDED

Cover Letter

To the evaluation committee,

Rather than describe the new Northern Rhode Island Conservation District site in prose, we built it. A working Pilot is live today — public pages live, content migrated from your current site, accessibility verified in CI, with a working CMS your staff can edit today.

Axelerant is an AI-native digital partner built to be yours to keep and grow. 150+ people across 12 countries, with deep Drupal and Acquia expertise: Drupal Certified Partner at Diamond tier, Acquia Elite Partner, and Acquia Top Technical Excellence Partner 2025. We pair strategy, design, engineering, and RevOps in one team so the platform we hand over is one your team can own and grow.

Required disclosures. All source code, design, content, databases, hosting credentials, and administrative control are delivered at launch and transferred on Northern Rhode Island Conservation District’s request at any time, with no additional cost. No principal or named team member is related to any Northern Rhode Island Conservation District board member or staff. No subcontractors are used on this engagement. We accept the RFP’s confidentiality terms. Axelerant certifies compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws including non-discrimination and equal employment opportunity. We confirm Professional Indemnity and Public Liability insurance, current and available for verification.

Assumptions, exceptions, and terms. Assumptions: content is migrated from the existing NRICD site; brand guidelines and the district logo are provided by NRICD; one stakeholder review track per phase. No exceptions are taken to the RFP terms — where the RFP invites optional-element pricing, those items are quoted rather than excluded. This proposal is valid for 90 days from submission. The fixed fee includes a 30-day post-launch workmanship warranty. Standard provisions: IP transfer at launch, milestone billing per the payment schedule, and ongoing maintenance available at a monthly rate.

Ankur Gupta

CEO, Axelerant

02 / 31

Executive Summary

Reviewers can try the site before they read the proposal.

The Pilot is a real, working site — built from your content. Instead of flat mockups, all pages are a clickable design your team can evaluate on a phone or desktop right now.

1

Working pilot, live today

Built from your content — a real site your staff can click through and edit.

8

Weeks to launch

From contract signing to production launch. The Pilot already proves the design, the CMS, and the accessibility.

0

axe-core violations

Every Pilot page passes WCAG 2.2 AA, verified in CI on each push. Accessibility is a build gate.

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About Axelerant

An AI-native digital partner built to be kept and grown.

150+ people across 12 countries. Four practices working as one team — so the platform we hand over is one your team can own and grow.

Strategy

Digital & AI Strategy

Platform architecture, AI strategy, product roadmaps. We start with the business outcome and work backward to the technology.

Design

Experience Design

UX research, design systems, accessible front-ends. Design that the in-house team can maintain after we leave.

Engineering

Digital Engineering

Drupal, Acquia, headless, cloud. Deep CMS expertise with a contributed-module culture — we give back what we build.

Grow

RevOps & Growth

Marketing operations, HubSpot, analytics, CRO. The site is a growth engine — we wire the funnel end to end.

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How We Work

A continuous loop.

Most agencies hand over a site and walk away. We run a continuous loop — experience, data, activation, optimization — so the platform compounds value after launch.

01 · Experience

Design & build

Research-driven design, accessible front-ends, and a CMS your staff own. The experience is the entry point.

02 · Data

Measure & learn

Analytics, heatmaps, and content audits wired from the start. Every decision is grounded in what users actually do.

03 · Activation

Personalize & target

AI-driven content recommendations, segmented campaigns, and marketing automation. The right message to the right audience.

04 · Optimization

Iterate & improve

A/B testing, performance tuning, and accessibility re-audits on a recurring cadence. The site gets better every quarter.

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Certifications & Partnerships

Tier-one partnerships that prove the depth.

Drupal Certified Partner

Diamond

Drupal Association

Premium Partner

Acquia Partner

Elite

Acquia Top Technical Excellence

2025

AWS

Select Tier

HubSpot

Gold

WP Engine

Preferred

ISO 27001

Certified

ISO 9001

Certified

Crown Commercial Service

UK Gov Supplier

Make

Silver Partner

06 / 31

The Pilot

Reviewers can try the site before they read the proposal.

A real, live, clickable website your reviewers can evaluate today — with the CMS, the content, the accessibility, and the analytics all running.

nricd.axelerantdemo.com

07 / 31

Pilot · Homepage

The first thing visitors need, answered above the fold.

Top-task navigation puts the three things people do most directly under the masthead. The program directory, news, and the land-access map all feed from the CMS — no developer needed to publish. The current Resource Directory is restructured into a searchable, categorized program directory so farmers and landowners filter by need instead of scrolling a flat list.

Top-task nav Resource Directory restructured News & announcements Land-access map

nricd.org

08 / 31

nricd.org/programs

Pilot · Programs

Every program, structured and searchable.

Programs are content types in Drupal, not hand-built pages — the Scituate Reservoir Watershed Education Program, Urban Growers Leadership Program, USDA NRCS technical assistance, and more. Pagefind indexes each program page client-side for instant results. Staff manage the full directory from the CMS without a developer.

Structured records Pagefind search Editor-owned 14 programs migrated

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Pilot · CMS

Drag, drop, preview live.

The homepage is a landing page in the Drupal CMS. Staff open the Puck visual editor from the Design Studio tab and compose the page from pre-built blocks — hero, pathway group, mission band, CTA. Click any block to edit its fields in the right panel; the canvas updates instantly. The component holds the layout and the accessibility; the editor supplies the words. No code, no Mobirise, no work-order webmaster.

Puck visual editor Live preview Structured fields

cms.nricd.org/editor/46

Puck visual editor editing the NRICD homepage with Hero selected

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Pilot · Mobile & Accessibility

Mobile-first, accessible by default.

0

axe violations

2.2

WCAG AA

24px

Min tap target

AA

Measured contrast

Farmers and forest landowners in the field are the mobile audience — checking programs or finding the land-access map on a phone. Art-directed hero crops per breakpoint. Keyboard navigation throughout with visible focus states. A system-wide dark mode cuts glare for outdoor reading.

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cms.nricd.org/dashboard

Pilot · Compliance Dashboard

Compliance you can verify.

Accessibility, performance, and SEO on one dashboard in the CMS at /dashboard. axe-core, Lighthouse, and the SEO audit run in CI on each push — a regression fails the build. The dashboard pulls the most recent CI results, so the numbers are measured each build.

Live audits CI-gated Monthly re-audit

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Scope of Work

Four phases, one fixed fee.

The Pilot already proves the design, the CMS, and the accessibility. The engagement refines, migrates, integrates, trains, and launches — in 8 weeks.

Phase 1 · Week 1

Discovery & Strategy

Stakeholder interviews with NRICD staff and board, content inventory from the live crawl, sitemap and IA review against the top tasks for farmers and landowners, brand and accessibility baseline. Confirm the Pilot direction with your team.

Phase 2 · Weeks 2–3

Design

Visual design refinement grounded in the Pilot — forest-green palette, mission-warm register. Component library, style guide, and art-directed responsive crops. Design review cycles with your stakeholders before build begins.

Phase 3 · Weeks 4–7

Build

Decoupled Drupal 11 with content served over GraphQL Compose. The Astro front-end consumes the API at build time. Content migration from the current Mobirise site, ArcGIS map and donation integrations wired, continuous a11y and Lighthouse audits in CI. Staff training begins in parallel.

Phase 4 · Week 8

Launch & Handover

Cross-browser QA, screen-reader testing, two training sessions, DNS cutover, launch-day monitoring, and 30 days of post-launch fixes included in the fixed fee.

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Strategy · Barriers & Mitigations

Honest about what could go wrong.

Barrier

Low tech literacy among farmers

Mitigation: Mobile-first design with large tap targets, plain-language labels, and a top-task nav that surfaces the three things people actually do. No jargon, no buried menus. The Pilot validates the IA with real users before build.

Barrier

ArcGIS map dependency

Mitigation: The GIS Services Contractor RFP runs in parallel. We embed the ArcGIS Online map as an iframe so the site works regardless of the GIS project's timeline. If the GIS deliverable slips, the site launches with a placeholder map and swaps in the real one when ready.

Barrier

Content migration from Mobirise

Mitigation: The current site is static Mobirise HTML — no CMS export. We crawl and parse the live pages, map content to Drupal content types, and verify each page against the source. The Pilot already proves the migration approach with 14 programs and 9 news posts moved.

Barrier

Staff capacity for CMS adoption

Mitigation: Two training courses in the fixed fee, split by role: CMS administrators (half day — users, forms, structure) and content editors (90 minutes — pages, news, programs). Both recorded, with written materials, plus a post-launch refresher. The Puck editor and Webform builder are visual tools — no code, no HTML.

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Technology Stack

Open-source the whole way down. You own every line.

CMS

Decoupled Drupal 11

Drupal 11 core with GraphQL Compose exposing content as a typed API. NRICD staff manage programs, news, staff profiles, and events through structured fields — no Mobirise, no work-order webmaster. Axelerant is a Diamond-tier Drupal Certified Partner.

Page building

Puck Visual Editor

Drag-and-drop page composition from pre-built components, running inside the Drupal admin. Editors see exactly what users see. Every component is accessible by default and version-controlled. No code required.

Frontend

Astro + Tailwind CSS

Island architecture ships zero JS by default. Tailwind drives the forest-green design tokens. The result: 90+ Lighthouse scores on all Pilot pages, measured in CI — fast even on rural mobile connections.

Edge

Cloudflare Workers

Edge-side rendering and caching at 300+ locations. Sub-50ms TTFB globally. The edge handles seedling-sale and workshop-registration spikes without provisioning.

Search

Pagefind

Client-side static search. Indexes each program and resource page at build time, zero server cost. Instant results — works offline in the field.

AI

AI Concierge

Natural-language search grounded in NRICD’s content — “how do I apply for the Farm/Forest/Open Space program?” Answers cite their sources. Editors get AI-assisted drafting inside the CMS.

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Webform · Form Builder

Every field visible, organized, and accessible.

Event registration, volunteer signup, and donation forms in Drupal Webform are structured records. Each field has a label, a type, and a validation rule. Complex forms are organized in vertical tabs so editors can see the whole form at a glance. No developer needed to add or edit a form.

Structure

Typed fields

Text, date, file, select, reference — each field is typed and validated. Structured records keep required-field logic intact for event registrations and volunteer signups.

Organization

Vertical tabs

Long forms are grouped into vertical tabs. Editors see the structure without scrolling through one endless page of fields — ideal for multi-section donation and registration forms.

Compliance

Accessible by default

Each field has a label associated by ID. Error messages are announced to screen readers. Required fields are marked programmatically.

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Mobile-First

Responsive, art-directed.

Farmers and forest landowners are mobile-first — the site has to work on a phone in the barn. Hero images are art-directed per breakpoint so the focal point survives at every width, and navigation collapses to a single thumb-reachable menu.

Art-directed crops Thumb-reachable nav 90+ Lighthouse mobile

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Accessibility

Accessibility is a build gate.

Each Pilot page is audited at WCAG 2.2 AA in CI. A regression fails the build.

0

axe violations

2.2

WCAG AA

24px

Min tap target

AA

Measured contrast

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cms.nricd.org/dashboard

Compliance Dashboard

Live audits at cms.nricd.org/dashboard.

Accessibility, performance, and SEO on one page. axe-core, Lighthouse, and the SEO audit run in CI on each push. The dashboard reads the latest CI results — the numbers are measured each build. A regression fails the build before it reaches production.

axe-core Lighthouse SEO audit CI-gated

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Top Tasks

The three things people actually do.

Every other section of the site supports these. We designed the Pilot around them, and the production build will too.

Find programs

Farmers and forest landowners finding conservation assistance — USDA NRCS technical assistance, the Farm/Forest/Open Space tax program, the Scituate Reservoir Watershed Education Program. Each program is a structured, searchable page in the CMS.

Register

Event registration for workshops, board meetings, and the annual seedling sale. Each registration is a structured form with typed fields and validation, handing off to the processor’s checkout where a fee applies. Staff can add or edit forms without a developer.

Get involved

Donations, volunteer signup, and the Mailchimp newsletter. Each path is a clear, accessible form. Donation and fee payments run through Stripe or PayPal’s own embedded, tokenised checkout — no cardholder data ever touches the website, so PCI scope stays with the processor.

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Integrations

Wired into the tools NRICD already uses.

ArcGIS Online

Interactive land-access map embedded directly — soil, hydrology, parcel data, and farmland-viability layers from the GIS Services Contractor’s work, surfaced on the site for land seekers.

Google Translate

Integrated translation tool for multilingual stakeholders. One-click language switching on every page. Accessible to screen readers and low-tech-literacy users.

Mailchimp

Newsletter signup wired to the existing Mailchimp list. Event announcements and program updates push automatically. No manual export.

Donation Gateway

Stripe and PayPal embedded checkout for donations and event fees. Card fields render in the processor’s own tokenised elements, so no cardholder data touches the CMS and PCI scope stays with the processor. Receipts stored in the CMS.

Analytics (GA4)

GA4, heatmaps, and content audits wired from the start. Privacy-compliant by default. Every decision grounded in what users do.

Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube links in the footer and share buttons on news and event pages. NRICD's existing social presence drives traffic back to the site.

Pagefind

Client-side static search indexes all program and resource pages at build time. Instant results, zero server cost, works offline in the field.

SEO & GEO (AI Discoverability)

Structured data, semantic HTML, and quotable content blocks so search engines and AI assistants surface NRICD as the authoritative source on Providence County conservation.

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Timeline

8 weeks from a September 15 start, four phases.

Phase 1

Discovery & Strategy

Stakeholder interviews with NRICD staff and board, content inventory, IA review, brand and accessibility baseline. Confirm the Pilot direction.

Week 1 · Sep 15–22

Phase 2

Design

Visual design refinement, component library, style guide, art-directed responsive crops. Review cycles with your team.

Weeks 2–3 · Sep 22–Oct 6

Phase 3

Build

Decoupled Drupal 11 with GraphQL Compose, Puck editor, content migration from Mobirise, ArcGIS and donation integrations, CI audits. Staff training in parallel.

Weeks 4–7 · Oct 6–Nov 3

Phase 4

Launch & Handover

Cross-browser QA, screen-reader testing, training sessions, DNS cutover, launch monitoring, 30 days of fixes.

Week 8 · Launch week of Nov 3

Dates assume the RFP’s own schedule — selection by September 15 and a contract start that week. That puts go-live in the week of November 3, against your November 1 target. If NRICD needs November 1 exactly, we can start Phase 1 the week selection is announced and launch on the 1st; the Pilot is already built, which is what makes that compression safe rather than optimistic.

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Investment

Total fixed fee

$17,500

Discovery & Strategy

$3,000

Design

$4,000

Build & Migration

$7,500

Launch, Training & 30-day Support

$3,000

Optional elements — none required

Care plan, year two onward

$1,800/yr

Additional training session (3 hrs, recorded)

$450

Professionally translated second language

$1,200

Work beyond the scope above

$150/hr

Payment Schedule

On contract signing — 30%

$5,250

At design sign-off — 30%

$5,250

At launch — 30%

$5,250

30 days post-launch — 10%

$1,750

Every item in this proposal is inside the $17,500 — design, build, migration, integrations, training, launch, and 30 days of post-launch fixes. Open-source stack, no licensing costs. Nothing in the optional list is needed to launch or to meet an RFP requirement; year-one care is already included. Hosting is billed by the providers direct to NRICD, so it never carries our margin: the public site on Cloudflare’s US edge network (~$20–50/mo), and the Drupal CMS on a small US-region cloud instance (~$25–50/mo) that only editors reach — the published site is static, so public uptime never depends on the CMS being up.

Terms. Invoiced per the schedule above, net 15. Axelerant retains no ownership of delivered code, design, or content. Either party may terminate on 30 days written notice; NRICD pays only for work completed. Professional Indemnity and Public Liability insurance maintained throughout.

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Green Procurement

Sustainable by design.

Digital-first delivery, remote-first team, and efficient hosting keep the carbon footprint of this project — and the resulting site — low.

Standards

ISO 14001

Environmental management system certified. We measure and reduce our operational carbon footprint annually.

Team

Remote-first

150+ people across 12 countries, working remotely. Minimal commute footprint. Minimal office energy overhead.

Delivery

Digital-first

Digital-first documentation. No travel for routine meetings.

Hosting

Sustainable edge

Cloudflare Workers runs on renewable-powered edge locations. Static-first architecture minimises origin compute. Sub-50ms TTFB means less energy per page load.

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Support & SLA

Care plan included for year one.

30 days of post-launch fixes are included in the fixed fee. After that, the care plan covers security updates, monthly audits, and priority support — so compliance does not drift.

The care plan renews annually. You can cancel at any time — all code, credentials, and documentation are yours from the start. Cancel anytime.

Critical — site down, data loss

2h response

High — core function broken

4h response

Standard — feature issue

1 business day

Low — cosmetic, enhancement

2 business days

Monthly: security updates · a11y re-audit · Lighthouse check · backup verification

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Team

Senior people on every project.

Ankur Gupta

CEO

Founded Axelerant in 2005. Sets the company direction: AI-native delivery, open-source commitment, and partnerships that prove depth.

Prateek Jain

Director, Digital Solutions & AI Strategy

Leads platform architecture and AI strategy. Two decades in Drupal and enterprise CMS. Owns the technical direction of every engagement.

Hetal Mistry

Director, Global Delivery

Runs delivery across 12 countries. Ensures every engagement ships on time, on scope, and on budget — with the quality bar the partnerships demand.

Dheeraj Khindri

Director, Experience Design

Leads UX research, design systems, and accessible front-ends. Ensures the design your team receives is one they can maintain and grow.

Bassam Ismail

Director, Digital Engineering

Leads the engineering practice. Drupal core contributor, Acquia-certified architect. Owns the code quality and contributed-module culture.

Nathan Roach

Director, Digital Marketing

Leads RevOps and growth. Analytics, marketing automation, CRO. Ensures the site is a growth engine.

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Case Study · County of Riverside, California

52 public-agency sites, one governed platform.

Scope A 48-site Drupal platform, now 52, for California’s 4th-largest county — 2.4M+ residents, bilingual English/Spanish, on Acquia Cloud Site Factory.

Integrations Acquia Site Factory, Search API migration, Cloudflare CDN, Varnish caching.

The challenge, and the fix Deployments were taking 12–16 hours and depended on one engineer in one timezone. We trained a second engineer and introduced a PR review process to cut the bottleneck.

Why it is here Bilingual delivery at public-agency scale is the same problem NRICD’s multilingual requirement poses, and the support hours fell as the engagement matured rather than climbing.

52

Departmental sites, one foundation

2.4M+

Residents served

60 → 30

Monthly support hours, reduced

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Case Study · Energy Safety Canada

Discovery first, then a Drupal 11 rebuild wired to their membership system.

Constraints & integrations An iMIS membership system the old site could not reach; an interactive map fetching from Salesforce CRM, processed through Drupal, rendered via React; Algolia search.

How we handled it Buffer built into the content-freeze window — the client’s internal content cutoff was set earlier than the code-freeze date, specifically to absorb late content without slipping launch.

Why it is here A member-facing organisation whose registrations, records and map all live in systems outside the CMS — the same shape as NRICD’s events, donations and ArcGIS land map, and the same reason our November date holds.

“There was always a willingness to step in, collaborate, and push through challenges as one team.”

Project Manager, Business Improvement — Energy Safety Canada

Drupal 11

Full CMS replatform

iMIS

Membership system integrated

Active

Support & maintenance retainer

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Case Study · University of East London

Content-rich, context-poor — rebuilt around the journey.

Constraints Disconnected touchpoints across admissions, research, and student services; the old site was “content-rich but context-poor”.

What we did Full CMS rebuild — Sitecore to Drupal — with funnel tracking, personalization, and WCAG 2.1 AA remediation.

Results Applications +73% and enrollments +32% over two years; relevant traffic +30%; publishing 3× faster; user exits −46% from personalization; 99.9% uptime.

Lesson learned The compounding gains are credited to the full-funnel approach — CMS, personalization, and analytics rebuilt together rather than sequentially — not to any single fix.

Why it is here It is why NRICD’s analytics and accessibility baselines are set in Phase 1 rather than audited at the end.

+73%

Applications, over two years

+32%

Enrollments, over two years

99.9%

Uptime

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Relevant Experience & References

Three references — sector-specific delivery.

Municipal Government

County of Riverside, California

A 52-site Drupal platform for the 4th-largest county in California (2.4M+ residents), modernised and maintained by Axelerant — Acquia Cloud Site Factory, automated CI/CD, Cloudflare CDN and Varnish, and bilingual English/Spanish content governed from one shared foundation.

rivco.gov · Contact available on request

Public Sector · Member Association

Energy Safety Canada

National safety association for Canada’s energy industry, based in Calgary. Discovery, then a Drupal 11 rebuild integrated with their iMIS membership system — Algolia search, Playwright test automation, GitHub CI/CD, and a Salesforce-fed locator tool. Active support retainer.

energysafetycanada.com · Current client contact provided on request

Public Sector · Higher Education

University of East London

A public institution’s digital front door replatformed from Sitecore to Drupal — disconnected journeys unified, funnel tracking and personalization rebuilt with the CMS, WCAG 2.1 AA remediation. Applications +73%, enrollments +32% over two years.

uel.ac.uk · Fiona Harrison, Product Owner · f.harrison@uel.ac.uk · +44 7872 424672

Per the RFP, two references are required. We provide three. Remaining contact details are furnished to NRICD on request or upon selection, per client privacy preferences.

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Built to last.

Intelligence that delivers.

axelerant.com sana.tomar@axelerant.com