Race to End Alzheimer’s

Custom WordPress development, CRM and donation infrastructure for a nonprofit that races to fund Alzheimer's research, plus an Elementor rebuild that handed editing back to the team.

Race to End Alzheimer’s, also known as R2endalz, runs its own race car to fund a cure, and each year the car carries the names of people lost to the disease. We have been their development and technical team for years, building the custom WordPress site, the donation and CRM plumbing behind it, and most recently an Elementor rebuild that lets the team edit the site on their own.

Race to End Alzheimer’s races to fund a cure. The organization fields its own race car, with drivers and crew, and every year the car carries the names of people lost to Alzheimer’s. The website is the hub for all of it: it collects online donations and supports giving at races, events and advertising campaigns, and the money goes to institutions researching a cure. We started by analyzing the existing site, then redesigned it and rebuilt what it needed underneath.

Most of the work has been custom development. We built custom WordPress themes and plugins, custom post types such as the Wall of Champions, and custom Elementor widgets, including the donation form and a champions grid with search, sorting and modals. Behind the site we connected the tools a nonprofit runs on: CiviCRM for donors and donations, Mailchimp for email, and Google Cloud with a service account that feeds form submissions into Google Sheets. We also profiled and improved site performance, and handled the ongoing debugging and maintenance that a live donation platform needs.

Most recently we moved the whole site to Elementor, preserving the original custom design as closely as Elementor’s limits allow, with results better than we expected, so the team can now edit pages themselves without a developer. Race to End Alzheimer’s has become one of our longest-running clients, and we continue to build, fix and evolve the platform alongside them.

Project info

Requirements

Take an existing donation site for a racing-based Alzheimer's charity and make it faster, easier to run and easier to update, through custom WordPress development, a redesign, reliable donation capture, and the CRM and email integrations a nonprofit needs to steward its donors, all handed over so the team can edit pages without a developer.

Strategies & techniques

Existing-site analysis · Functional analysis · Site redesign · Custom WordPress theme and plugin development · Donation form engineering · CRM integration (CiviCRM) · Email and audience integration (Mailchimp) · Google Cloud and Google Sheets integration · Custom post types and Elementor widgets · Site performance analysis and optimization · Elementor migration preserving the original design · Handover for client self-editing

Tools

Analysis and planning: an audit of the existing WordPress site, its donation flow and its integrations, plus process mapping of how donations arrive from online giving, events and campaigns. Design and build: a site redesign carried into custom WordPress themes and plugins, custom post types such as the Wall of Champions, and custom Elementor widgets for the donation form and the champions grid, with AJAX search, sorting and modal navigation. Integrations and data: CiviCRM for constituent and donation management, Mailchimp for email, and Google Cloud with a service account connecting Contact Form 7 submissions to Google Sheets, all on SiteGround with SSH and the cv CLI for CiviCRM maintenance. Performance and delivery: profiling and improving site performance, then migrating the whole site to Elementor while preserving the original design as closely as Elementor allows.

Final results

A faster, more maintainable donation site that captures giving from online, events, races and campaigns, backed by working CRM, email and spreadsheet integrations that keep donor data moving without manual work. The Elementor rebuild kept the custom design almost intact, better than we expected within Elementor’s limits, and handed day-to-day editing to the team so they can update pages without a developer. Race to End Alzheimer’s has become one of our longest-running clients, and we keep developing, debugging and maintaining the platform as their needs change.