Consolidating a Statewide
Digital Ecosystem
How the Minnesota Historical Society migrated mnhs.org and its cultural properties from Drupal to HubSpot, uniting a sprawling multi-property estate under a single platform.
At a Glance: Minnesota Historical Society
The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) is one of the oldest and largest historical societies in the United States. Founded in 1849, it operates 26 historic sites and museums across the state, runs an active publishing house, and manages a major research library and archive.
Its digital footprint was massive and fragmented. The legacy estate was built on Drupal, creating structural bottlenecks for a sprawling, multi-domain web presence that served schoolchildren, educators, genealogists, tourists, and donors.
A unified platform anchored in HubSpot CMS Enterprise, uniting a 1,300+ page flagship site, a 1,300-article online encyclopedia, and a live integration to a several-hundred-thousand-record collections database, all timed with the historical society's digital transformation.
The Organization and Its Digital Challenge
A statewide institution with many front doors
MNHS was not running one website so much as a federation of them. The flagship domain, mnhs.org, served as the main front door: visitor information, exhibits and programs, membership, giving, education resources, and the connective tissue across 26 historic sites and museums statewide. Surrounding it were independent properties that had grown up on their own URLs, with their own visual identities and their own content models:
- MNopedia — an online encyclopedia of Minnesota’s people, places, and events, with well over a thousand richly cited articles plus associated media and historical documents. Effectively the Wikipedia of the state, on its own domain and brand.
- The U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 site — a culturally significant, emotionally weighty repository documenting the conflict among and against Indigenous peoples in what is now Minnesota: stories, oral histories, documents, images, and video, again on its own URL with its own look and feel.
- The research library and archive — hundreds of thousands of collections records (photographs, artifacts, maps, oral histories) and people records (census-style genealogical data), governed inside a dedicated collections management system the institution had no intention of leaving.
- The Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub — a deep, partly multilingual newspaper archive reflecting the state’s Swedish and other immigrant histories, requiring English and Swedish handling.
Each property answered a real audience need. But to a visitor, a teacher planning a field trip, a genealogist tracing an ancestor, a donor renewing a membership, a member of a descendant community researching the U.S.–Dakota War...the seams showed. Branding changed between domains. Navigation and footers were inconsistent. The same institution felt like several different organizations depending on where you landed.
Why Drupal had become the bottleneck
The legacy estate was built on Drupal. For an institution whose web team is small (think a web manager, a few dedicated web support staff, a creative team owning style, and roughly twenty distributed departmental editors making quick edits) Drupal had become a structural liability rather than an asset:
The Legacy Pain Points:
- 01 Developer Reliance: Routine content work required developer involvement or fragile workarounds, which throttled the distributed editor model the institution runs on.
- 02 Maintenance Tax: Hosting, module compatibility, security patching, and version upgrades consumed scarce technical capacity that the team would rather spend on programs and audiences.
- 03 Template Sprawl: Multiple themes, child themes, and template sprawl across the properties made even small visual changes risky and slow.
- 04 Data Silos: The fragmentation across domains made coherent analytics, SEO, and conversion measurement nearly impossible.
The Strategy: Anchoring in HubSpot
The platform decision was deliberate and tightly coupled to the institution’s broader strategy. The reasoning we worked through with MNHS:
Consolidation of vendors and systems
MNHS was already investing significant budget and staff time in a CRM-centered digital transformation that pulled ticketing, events, memberships, and constituent records together. With that investment committed, putting the website on the same platform was the move that made the whole thing pay off. A membership purchased on the site, a ticket bought for a site visit, and a donation made during a campaign now resolve to one constituent record rather than three disconnected ones.
Eliminating the maintenance tax
HubSpot removes the categories of work that were draining the internal team: no servers to host, no add-on ecosystem to keep mutually compatible, no security patch treadmill, no major-version upgrade projects. That capacity returns to content, audiences, and programs.
A CMS the team can run
MNHS runs on roughly twenty distributed departmental editors plus a small web team and a creative team. The platform had to be safe in the hands of non-developers - modular page building, no requirement to touch HTML for routine work, role-based permissions, and editorial workflow. HubSpot’s editor model fit the institution’s operating structure rather than fighting it.
Native alignment with the transformation
Because the website and the CRM transformation now live on one platform, behavior and transactions on the site feed the constituent record directly. The site stopped being a brochure that pointed at other systems and became an integrated front end of the institution’s supporter relationships.
This was, fundamentally, a migration and not a redesign. The brief was to move an enormous, heterogeneous content estate onto a new platform and unify it, not to reinvent the institution’s visual identity.
Our Approach to a Multi-Property Migration
Discovery & Brand Consolidation
Discovery, content audit, and architecture: We began with a full inventory across every property: pages, landing pages, article libraries, media, structured content, templates, and themes. The legacy estate ran multiple themes with child themes and many templates per theme. The audit’s purpose was threefold: decide what migrates, what is consolidated, and what is responsibly retired; design a single information architecture and top-level navigation that could absorb all properties without burying any audience’s path; and define the content models, taxonomy, and metadata structure that would make the unified site governable afterward.
One brand, many properties: The defining architectural decision was to bring MNopedia and the U.S.–Dakota War site under the mnhs.org umbrella so that global branding (logos, top-level menus, footer, etc.) is the parent brand everywhere, while each property keeps the content model its audience needs. This is precisely the 'intentional pathways between a main domain and auxiliary sites' problem so many multi-site heritage organization faces - solved by unifying branding while respecting each property’s content needs.
Templates, Cultural Care & Bilingual Content
Component-based templates for a non-developer team: Every template was rebuilt as modular, reusable components so the web team and departmental editors can compose and maintain pages without writing code. Page building is modular, routine edits never require HTML, and role-based permissions plus editorial workflow keep distributed editing safe at the institution’s scale.
Cultural and Indigenous content handled with care: The U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 archive is not ordinary web content. It documents a painful history for Dakota people and for the state. Our handling prioritized faithful migration of stories, oral histories, documents, and media; preservation of context so material is never stripped of its framing; and media presentation that does justice to the source rather than forcing it into a generic template. For an organization whose mandate explicitly includes authentically reflecting Indigenous and other diverse cultural perspectives, this kind of editorial and technical sensitivity was vital to the work.
Bilingual archive content: Minnesota’s Swedish immigrant history runs deep, and parts of the archive, particularly newspaper material in the digital newspaper hub, required English and Swedish handling. We implemented language handling so bilingual archive content is correctly structured, navigable, and discoverable rather than treated as an afterthought of an English-only site.
3. The Collections & People Integration
The constraint that shaped everything: MNHS holds several hundred thousand collections records - photographs, artifacts, maps, oral histories - and a large body of people records. All of it lived in EMu Collections Management System. The institution had no intention of moving off that system: it is the authoritative system of record. The requirement was that the website must present these records live, but the collections system remains the single source of truth. No bulk export. No duplicated database. No migration of the catalog into the CMS.
What we built: We built a custom module on the website plus an API integration to the collections system. Conceptually it has three layers: an Integration layer (API connection scoped to public records), a Presentation/search client (a clean, accessible interface native to the unified brand), and a Custom module on HubSpot that hosts the search client without bolting on external tools.
Why it mattered: This integration is the difference between a museum website that talks about a collection and one that actually opens it. A genealogist can search people records from the public site. A researcher can query collections without learning an internal system. The archivists keep their authoritative catalog untouched and in their control.
Redirects and SEO equity
Consolidating multiple domains into one is where search equity goes to die if it is not managed deliberately. We built a comprehensive redirect map covering thousands of legacy URLs across the former separate domains, preserving deep links into encyclopedia articles and archive material, with SEO-clean URL structures and metadata carried into the new architecture. Protecting the inbound equity of a thousand-plus encyclopedia articles alone justified the rigor here.
Membership, Giving, Events, and the CRM Picture
MNHS’s membership, giving, and events surfaces had to keep working through the migration while the larger digital transformation project touching ticketing, events, and the customer portal on the CRM side was underway. Our responsibility was that once the membership, giving, and events surfaces were ready, that we ensured a clean coupling to that ecosystem. The strategic payoff is integration: because the site moved onto the same platform as the institution’s CRM and digital transformation, a membership bought on the site, a ticket associated with a site visit, and a donation made in a campaign now converge on a single constituent record. Before, those interactions scattered across disconnected systems. This is exactly the membership/donation/event-registration-into-CRM pattern a heritage charity expects from a modern site. We delivered it not as a bolt-on, but as a consequence of the platform consolidation itself.
Results &
Project Impact
Pages Migrated Off Drupal
Encyclopedia Articles Rehomed
Historic Location Microsites Created
Web Properties Unified
What this consolidation delivered for the institution:
- Unified Brand Experience: Three independent web properties - the flagship, the online encyclopedia, and the Indigenous-history archive - unified under one domain, one navigation, and one brand, with intentional pathways between the flagship and its absorbed properties.
- Cultural Preservation: A culturally sensitive Indigenous-history archive migrated with its context and media presentation intact, plus bilingual (English/Swedish) archive content correctly handled rather than anglicized by omission.
- Authoritative Live Search: Several hundred thousand collections and people records made publicly searchable live, with the institution’s authoritative collections system retained and untouched as the system of record.
- CRM Integration: A website that is now a native front end of the institution’s CRM and digital transformation, with supporter behavior and transactions resolving to single constituent records.
- Empowered Team: An editing model matched to how the institution actually works: distributed departmental editors and a small central web team operating safely without specialist developers.
Looking Ahead: A Model for Digital Transformation
9. Why This Engagement Maps to a National Heritage Consolidation
A national heritage organization consolidating a complex, multi-site web presence is asking, in substance, for what this engagement delivered. The parallels are direct:
| What a heritage-sector consolidation typically needs | What this engagement demonstrates |
|---|---|
| Unify a primary domain with legacy/auxiliary sites and microsites into one coherent ecosystem | Three independent properties unified under one brand, navigation, and information architecture with intentional cross-pathways |
| Authentically reflect Indigenous and diverse cultural perspectives | Sensitive migration of an Indigenous-history archive with context and media presentation preserved |
| Full bilingual capability across content | English/Swedish handling implemented across archive and newspaper content |
| A staff-friendly CMS that reduces developer reliance and maintenance cost | SaaS CMS with modular components, role-based workflow, run by non-developer editors plus a small web team |
| CRM integration for membership, donations, and event registration | Site surfaces coupled into a CRM/transformation so transactions resolve to single constituent records |
| Robust redirect strategy to preserve SEO value during consolidation | Disciplined redirect mapping across thousands of legacy URLs over multiple retired domains |
| Content audit, taxonomy, IA, and migration of extensive legacy content | Full multi-property audit, unified IA, content models and taxonomy, 1,300+ pages and 1,300+ articles migrated |
| Complex technical integration to authoritative external systems | Live API integration surfacing 100K+ records while leaving the system of record in place |
| Accessible, mobile-first delivery | Responsive/mobile layout work and an accessibility bar applied through to the research search tools |