I went looking at ours because of an award. Vardot has two projects on the International Splash Awards 2026 nominee list, one in Healthcare and one in Non-profit. 
My first instinct was to write about the nomination. Then I read the seven judging criteria properly and found that one of them cannot be produced on demand at all: community contribution. 

How Are Splash Awards Nominees Actually Chosen?

Nominees are selected by jury score, not by entry. Organizations pay a fee per case, an independent jury scores every submission against published criteria, and only the three or four highest-scoring cases per category are named.

Entries are self-submitted, so the pool reflects who chose to enter and pay. Projects must also have launched recently to qualify, so this measures current work rather than a back catalog.

What Do the Seven Judging Criteria Reveal?

The published criteria are more useful than the results, because they show what experienced Drupal practitioners treat as evidence:

  1. Business case: whether the project achieved its stated objectives
  2. Community value: what it contributed back to Drupal
  3. Concept and strategy: clarity of the idea and consistency of execution
  4. Design and UX: visual quality and experience across devices
  5. Quality of execution: technical standards, including SEO and accessibility
  6. Innovativeness: relevance and distinctiveness
  7. Technology: performance, correct Drupal implementation, and integrations

One of these is about how the project looks. The other six are about whether it works, how it was built, and what it gave back. A portfolio that photographs well tells you about one of the seven. 

Which Criterion Is Hardest to Fake?

Community contribution. It is the only one of the seven that cannot be assembled for a pitch, which makes it the most informative one for a buyer.

Design can be commissioned. Case study copy can be written to order. A contribution record is a log of work given away over years. 

It is also rarer than it sounds. According to the Drupal Association, the Drupal Marketplace listed 2,283 companies in 2023. Of those, 591 made any contribution to Drupal that year. Within that contributing group, the top 14 percent produced 88 percent of everything contributed.

My read: contribution volume measures something procurement rarely asks about, which is whether an agency's engineers work at the layer where problems get fixed or the layer where they get worked around. An agency with core credits has patched the thing your platform runs on. An agency without them has routed around it.

What Does the Credit Total Actually Measure?

Less than it appears to, which is why the total is the wrong number to start with. A credit is awarded by a project maintainer when an issue is resolved, weighted by how widely the project is used and how significant the issue was. The weighting does real work: a security patch on core counts for more than a documentation fix on a small module. What it cannot show is where an agency chose to spend its effort. Two firms can post similar totals while one has been working in core and the other entirely inside its own distribution.

What Does Funding Contribution Actually Cost?

One full-time engineer, 40 hours a week, on Drupal AI rather than on client work. A full salary carried against no client revenue, approved annually as a line item in the budget. I set out the reasoning for it in this article.

The Drupal Association measures the result in weighted credits and sorts agencies into six tiers, re-evaluated annually:

Vardot Drupal Partner Tiers

Vardot holds Diamond, and we are a Gold Sponsor of the Drupal AI Initiative. Our Drupal.org profile showed credits on 793 issues in the past year and credit for three security advisories as of September 2026: 93 issues on the AI module, 71 on Drupal core, and 58 on Vartheme BS5, our Bootstrap 5 base theme.

Three practices follow from funding it this way:

  • Contrib over custom. We prefer contributed modules to custom code, with the reasoning documented per decision. Custom code is a maintenance liability you inherit. Contributed code is maintained by people who are not us.
  • Diagnosis separated from remediation. Our audit covers more than a dozen areas where most stop at security and performance, and it ends with a report rather than a proposal. We also recommend nonprofits require a pre-takeover audit before any support transition. Agreeing an SLA on a codebase nobody has inspected is a guess dressed as a commitment.
  • Stewardship instead of ticket-closing. Our support model tracks a software bill of materials across core, modules, custom code, and third-party packages. The measurable version is security advisories actioned within their disclosure window.
     

None of this makes Vardot the right agency for you. It makes the claims checkable against a public record. 

What Do Awards Actually Tell You?

An award tells you a jury of Drupal practitioners looked at a launched project and scored it well against seven published criteria. That is real, and it is worth exactly that much.

It is a snapshot at launch. It does not cover whether the agency answers a ticket in year three, or whether the project ran to budget, because the jury never sees the support queue or the invoices. Entry also costs money and staff time, so good agencies are often simply absent from the list.

Read a nomination as evidence that one project was built well. Read the contribution record for everything that happens after launch.

Where We Land: Most Evidence About an Agency Comes From the Agency

Ask a shortlist for proof of enterprise Drupal capability and most of what comes back is self-sourced. The firm being judged chooses the references. Case studies are written in-house. Awards are scored once, at launch.

None of that is dishonest. The party authors it with something to gain, Vardot included, which limits what it can settle.

The contribution record is the exception. It is assembled by maintainers over years, on a page the agency does not own. Turns out the most useful evidence about a Drupal agency is the evidence the agency has the least control over.

How Should You Read an Agency's Contribution Record?

Open drupal.org/{organization-name}, go to the Credits tab, and filter to the last 12 months. Four checks, in order of signal strength:

  1. Look at where the credits land. Credits on Drupal core and widely used contributed modules mean something different from credits concentrated entirely in an agency's own distribution. Some of both is normal. Ours runs 71 on core and 93 on the AI module alongside 58 on our own theme. Apply the same reading to that mix as to anyone else's.
  2. Check security advisory credits. Rarer than issue credits, and issued through coordinated disclosure, so an agency cannot self-award them. Their presence tells you people there are trusted with that work.
  3. Read the last 12 months, not the lifetime total. Lifetime totals reward age. Recent credits tell you whether the people contributing now are the people you would actually get on your project.
  4. Ask whether contribution is funded or volunteered. Ask it directly in the RFP. A funded commitment survives a busy quarter. A volunteered one does not.

What your reading means:

  • Recent credits, spread across core and contrib, funded: the engineering bench is real and stable.
  • Large lifetime total, thin recent year: the team that earned it may have moved on.
  • Credits only in their own products: they build on Drupal rather than in it. That may be fine for your project. It is a different thing.

Do this for every agency on your shortlist before your next round of conversations. A shortlist of five takes under an hour, and it will change who you want to meet. 

Disclosure: we entered these awards and paid the entry fee on each of the two cases, so we have an interest in you taking award shortlists seriously. I would rather you discounted them. 

If Vardot is on your shortlist, start with the record rather than the pitch. For the broader question of what else to ask for during an RFP, we have a separate guide on choosing an enterprise Drupal partner.

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