The Need:
Bridges to the Past is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and sharing historical records, stories, and research through a membership-driven platform. By 2024, their aging website was no longer meeting the needs of their growing audience. The CMS was clunky, user management was fragmented, and the interface didn’t reflect the richness of the content or the professionalism of the organization.
Additionally, Bridges to the Past needed a way to offer secure member access, accept recurring payments, and manage multiple membership tiers with varying content restrictions. Their administrators also struggled with managing archived content and publishing updates, resulting in missed opportunities to engage their core audience.
The Solution:
MMG delivered a complete rebuild of the website—v3.0—on ExpressionEngine CMS, tightly integrated with AMemberPro to handle all membership, access control, and payment processing. We migrated and reorganized the organization’s extensive archive of digital records, ensuring historical assets were preserved and made easily searchable through category filtering and metadata tagging.
The design focused on improving navigation, readability, and access to protected member-only materials. We created tiered content areas, event listings, donation prompts, and personalized dashboards for logged-in users. On the backend, the admin panel was completely restructured, giving staff full control over content without touching code.
AMemberPro was configured to handle subscription payments, renewal reminders, content gating, and user access permissions—giving the organization a reliable engine to grow and sustain its membership base.
The Result:
Bridges to the Past v3.0 is now a fully modernized digital archive and community portal. The new platform offers a polished experience to both free users and paying members, supporting growth in subscriptions and online donations. Admins can easily manage and upload new content, control access by membership level, and track engagement metrics from within the system.
The combination of ExpressionEngine’s flexibility and AMemberPro’s secure access tools gave the nonprofit exactly what it needed: control, stability, and scalability. Since launch, membership growth has accelerated, bounce rates have dropped, and visitors are spending significantly more time exploring archived stories and content.
