Mapping the Markers That Honor Our Veterans

Every Blue Star and Gold Star marker tells a story: a tribute to a service member, a family, a community.

But finding any one of them, scattered across the country, was difficult. There was no way to search by location, no easy way to learn the history and meaning behind the program, and the page introducing it felt buried and out of step with the rest of NGC’s newly redesigned site. For a program built entirely on public remembrance, that lack of visibility was the core problem: a memorial that can’t be found isn’t fulfilling its purpose. NGC needed a digital experience that matched the significance of what these markers represent.

Alliance was brought back in to give the Blue Star & Gold Star Memorials program a dedicated, discoverable digital experience. At the center of the project was a single, ambitious goal: build a geolocation-powered locator that could ultimately map all 3,000+ Blue Star and Gold Star memorials nationwide, giving veterans, families, and the public a real way to search for and discover a memorial near them.

Alongside the locator, Alliance rebuilt the program’s introduction page to tell its story clearly, covering the history behind the Blue Star and Gold Star, what each marker type represents, and how the tribute has grown since 1944. The call-to-action for reporting a memorial or requesting a new one was also redesigned to be far more visible, so the map of markers can stay complete and accurate over time.

The core goal: ultimately map all 3,000+ Blue Star and Gold Star memorials nationwide in one place. To help visitors find a memorial near them, Alliance designed and built a custom interactive locator that combines geolocation, map-based browsing, and clear pathways to each memorial’s details: its location, its story, and what it commemorates. Built to scale alongside the program, the tool gives every one of the 3,000+ markers nationwide a place to be discovered, with room for NGC to add new memorials as the tribute continues to grow.

Under the hood, the locator is built on Drupal 11, Alliance built a custom module to query and render geolocation data in real time across thousands of memorial records. The tool pairs a mapping API with Drupal’s Views and Search API for fast, filterable results, all running on a scalable content architecture built to grow with the database. That Drupal foundation gives NGC a flexible, future-proof platform as new memorials continue to be added.

The redesigned Blue Star & Gold Star Memorials experience gives this decades-long tribute a digital presence that finally matches its national scale, and it’s already paying off in visibility, discoverability, and trust in the record.

• A live, interactive memorial locator built toward the goal of mapping all 3,000+ Blue Star and Gold Star memorials nationwide
• #1 organic ranking for “Blue Star Memorials”
• A more complete national record, with a far more visible path for reporting and adding memorials