Website Redesign Proposal

To Katie, Danny, and the Community Giving Foundation team,

Thank you for the invitation to submit this proposal. I want you to know I didn't treat it lightly.

To prepare for writing this document, I spent time on csgiving.org and reviewed the reference sites you provided through the lens of your stated goals and challenges. I considered your March 2026 strategic framework launch, and how the next evolution of your online presence could better support and reinforce that structure throughout the user experience. I also paid close attention to the specific examples you called out, from BCCF's Follow Our Community section to Eastern University's use of content organization and dynamic functionality to surface different types of stories, news, and updates. Lastly, your frustration with Cornerstone did not go unheard.

HoneyQuill Agency is a boutique marketing studio based in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. I'm not a national firm that will assign your project to someone who has never been to Pennsylvania. I've been doing this work since 2006, across a wide range of industries and organization types, from local service businesses and regional nonprofits to workforce coalitions, faith communities, and economic development organizations. Working across that many different kinds of clients and challenges has made me a better problem-solver. When something looks unfamiliar, there's usually a parallel I've seen somewhere before.

What I bring to Community Giving Foundation is something I call storyteller marketing. At its heart, it's the belief that the most powerful connection a website can make is a human one, and that story is the most reliable vehicle for that connection. I noticed the word "stories" shows up throughout your RFP, and that tells me we're already thinking about this the same way. But a story without structure doesn't work, and structure without story doesn't either. Good design draws the eye, guides the visitor, and sets the stage before a single word is read. I care just as much about visual craft, layout, hierarchy, and the experience of moving through a page as I do about the words on it. When all of those things work together, a website stops being a digital brochure and starts being something a visitor actually feels. That's what I'm here to build.

You are not just updating a website. You are introducing a new chapter of your organization to the communities you have served for 25 years. That deserves to be done with care.

I'm glad you reached out, and I hope this proposal shows you why.

Sincerely,

I want to be specific about what I found.

Four Things Worth Naming Directly

1. Your new strategic framework needs a home that was built for it.

In March 2026, Community Giving Foundation publicly adopted a three-category framework: Your Community Endowment, Your Giving Services, and Your Foundation Leadership. This isn't a tagline refresh. It's a fundamental reframing of how you describe your responsibilities to the communities you serve. Your current homepage reflects an earlier version of how you told that story, organized around sections like Your Community Charitable Goals, Your Legacy, and Your Stories. Those aren't wrong, but they belong to a chapter that's closing. The new framework deserves a site designed around it from the start, not one that tries to accommodate it after the fact.

2. Your homepage isn't doing enough of the work.

Your current homepage is clean and organized, but it's compartmentalized in a way that doesn't actively guide people. A donor, a nonprofit director, and a first-time visitor all land on the same page and are largely left to sort themselves out. Your navigation carries a significant load, with ten sub-pages under About and six under Giving, and the homepage doesn't lighten that load with enough directional guidance. There are also some practical things worth naming: the Donate link sends visitors to your Foundant Giving Hub without opening a new tab, which interrupts the navigation flow in a way that can lose people entirely. These are all solvable, and they're connected to the same underlying opportunity: building a site that guides people rather than simply holding information for them.

3. Your content infrastructure can work a lot harder for you.

Your communications team is producing more stories of impact, more news, and more coverage of events and programs. That content is doing good work in newsletters and at events, but it isn't working as hard on your website as it could. What you described in your RFP, and what I've seen done well at BCCF and Lancaster County Community Foundation, is a site where a story about a Youth in Philanthropy grant automatically surfaces on the Youth in Philanthropy program page, in the news hub, and on the homepage feed. By developing a solid category and tag infrastructure for your new website, that kind of seamless connectivity becomes a natural, sustainable part of how your content works, not something anyone has to manage manually.

4. Your day-to-day tools and hosting should work for your team, not against them.

The Cornerstone page builder has been a common point of friction for a lot of teams, and I hear that clearly in your RFP. We build on WordPress using professional-grade premium tools that are widely supported, well-documented, and built for real editorial workflows. Every organization and team is a little different, and part of our process is understanding exactly what your team needs day to day and making sure the tools we choose match that reality.

On hosting: every HoneyQuill client is hosted on servers I manage directly. I limit each server to no more than twelve clients, with no other sites sharing that environment. You get transparent pricing, real access, and someone you can actually reach. Dedicated server space is available too if that's the right fit. No unexpected charges. No gatekeeping on your own website.

A note on your broader digital presence.

A website redesign is the right place to start, and it's also a good moment to look at the full picture of how Community Giving Foundation shows up online. Your Google Business Profile is an active local search asset for many organizations of your size and tenure, and there's meaningful room to put it to work more consistently. We think about the whole ecosystem, not just the page count. If it's useful, we've included some optional add-ons at the end of the Investment section.

Your Audiences, Mapped

Your RFP laid out five distinct audience groups. Here is how I'm thinking about each one and what they need most when they land on your site. Our discovery process will help us validate and refine this further together.

How I Work

Every project starts with a real conversation, not a template. I get on a call with everyone who will be involved: the people making decisions, the people creating content, and the people who will be managing the site day to day after launch. We talk about goals, audiences, tone, content ownership, assets like photography and video, technical access requirements like domain, hosting, and social accounts, and anything that would otherwise surface as a surprise at the wrong moment.

Information architecture comes before design. Design comes before development. Content lives alongside the build, not after it. Done in that order, the result is something that works the way it looks like it should. I'd rather build something beautiful and functional from the start than choose one at the expense of the other.

For Community Giving Foundation, the through-line is your three-category framework. It will shape the homepage, inform the menu structure, and give every page on the site a clear place to belong. What will make this site genuinely effective over time is how it carries your stories and how easy it makes finding them. A grant that changed a family's life. A scholarship recipient who went on to do something meaningful. A donor who found a way to make their giving matter in a place they love. Those stories exist. They deserve a home that surfaces them naturally, connects them to the right programs and audiences, and makes them easy to find and share.

Multimedia belongs in that conversation too. A well-produced video can do in ninety seconds what three pages of copy cannot. Authentic photography, real people from your communities rather than stock images of smiling strangers, makes your work feel real. Where original assets exist, we use them. Where they don't, we'll talk honestly about what photography direction, video, or thoughtfully chosen stock can do and where each is appropriate.

Every client at HoneyQuill is set up with a dedicated client portal that serves as the central hub for the entire engagement. Task management, work requests, file sharing, approvals, and communication all live in one place. You always know where the project stands, what's been completed, and what's coming next. Nothing gets lost in an email thread.

We design our process to fit within an 8 to 13 week window from kickoff to launch. How quickly we move through that range depends on the natural rhythm of the project: feedback cycles, asset readiness, and approval flow. With a June kickoff and a September 4 target, we have approximately 13 weeks, a solid window for a project of this scope with room for thoughtful review at each phase.

HoneyQuill Agency is a boutique marketing studio based in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. The name reflects how I work. Honey is patient, purposeful, and made through many small, intentional acts. A quill suggests craft, permanence, and words chosen carefully. I try to bring both of those qualities to every project.

HoneyQuill launched under its current name in October 2025, when I rebranded and relaunched the business I had been operating as Mediastead since 2013. My business partner retired after more than a decade of building something we were both proud of. The name changed. The clients, the work, and the approach didn't.

I've been doing this since 2006, when I started at a local web company before going out on my own. In the years since, I've worked across a wide range of industries: local service businesses, regional nonprofits, workforce coalitions, economic development organizations, faith communities, and more. That breadth has genuinely shaped how I think. Solving different kinds of problems for different kinds of organizations teaches you to see patterns, borrow ideas across contexts, and arrive at solutions that a narrower background might not surface.

Good digital presence requires craft and story working together. A beautiful site that doesn't communicate anything isn't doing its job. Compelling content buried in a frustrating experience doesn't get found. And a technically flawless site with nothing human at its center doesn't move anyone. I care about how a site looks, how it moves, how it guides the eye, and how it makes someone feel before they've read a word. I care just as much about what those words say and who they say it to. Getting those things right together is what I'm here for.

The Team on This Project

Every site below is a social sector organization I designed and built. The challenges they brought me are close relatives of what Community Giving Foundation is working to solve.

Community Giving Foundation has spent 25 years building something real in the Central Susquehanna region. From a single-purpose health conversion foundation to a $100 million endowment. From one county to five and a half. From Berwick Health and Wellness Foundation to a name that captures what you've actually become: a foundation built on community giving, in every direction that phrase can point.

What I'm offering is not a vendor relationship. It's a working partnership with someone who will learn your organization the way a good writer learns their subject: with patience, with questions, and with the intention of getting it right. Someone who thinks first about story, then builds the design, the architecture, and the content systems to carry that story to every person who finds you online.

If that sounds like what you're looking for, I'd love to be a part of this next chapter.