- 5 min read
All Hands and Hearts - How a website project became a brand evolution and the storytelling platform to match.
- Industry
- Nonprofit
- Platform
- WordPress
- Partnership
- 12 month project
180%
Organic social traffic growth within 7 weeks of launch
46,809
Total sessions in the first 8 weeks post-launch
For us, the new website has been truly transformational.
Project intro
Helping a global disaster relief organization tell a story as bold as their mission.
All Hands and Hearts is a global disaster relief nonprofit mobilizing volunteers to communities affected by hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other disasters worldwide. When they came to Lightburn in 2024, they were looking for more than a technical rebuild. They needed a partner who could help them build a digital presence that matched the scale and significance of their work.
What followed was a year long engagement that evolved well beyond the original scope. Leadership transitions mid-project brought a bolder vision for the organization's identity, opening the door to brand exploration that ultimately produced a refreshed visual identity now woven throughout everything they do. Lightburn navigated every pivot and delivered a platform the team is proud to put in front of donors, board members, and the world.
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A platform worthy of their mission
They needed a website that put their impact front and center and gave donors, volunteers, and the public a compelling reason to engage.
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A tool the whole team could use
Content updates shouldn't require a developer. They needed a flexible CMS that empowered their marketing team to move at the speed of disaster response.
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A partner invested in the bigger picture
They needed someone who could navigate complexity, not just execute a build. We came ready to build a website and stayed to help them find their voice.
The Problem
An organization that had outgrown its digital identity in every way.
A CMS that required expert intervention
The site was built on a heavily customized AVADA theme with a bespoke plugin, making even routine content updates dependent on experienced developers. The marketing team couldn't move at the speed the mission demanded.
A donor journey that left the site
Classy donation buttons redirected users entirely off-site to Classy-owned giving pages, breaking the donor experience and making it impossible to properly track conversions without duplicating ecommerce data.
Content that had outgrown its architecture
Hundreds of pages had accumulated over the years, many rarely visited and difficult to update. Navigation was clunky, site search didn't work, and there was no clear strategy to keep content relevant as the organization evolved.
A brand ready for a bigger stage
The existing visual identity was busy and inconsistent across global affiliates, the site didn't meet WCAG accessibility standards or Core Web Vitals benchmarks, and critically, it no longer reflected the organization All Hands and Hearts had become.
A project that had to evolve mid-stream
Leadership transitions brought new stakeholders and a new CEO with a bolder vision for the organization's identity. The project scope expanded significantly, requiring flexibility, multiple change orders, and a willingness to pause and get things right rather than just ship.
The Solution
Discovery-led, brand-forward, and built for where they were headed.
Deep discovery that set the foundation
Stakeholder interviews, content audits, competitor research, and analytics reviews gave us a comprehensive picture of where the site stood and where the organization was headed. When leadership shifted mid-project, we used that foundation to go deeper rather than start over.
A refreshed visual identity built to last
We developed a bold new design system and style guide that resolved years of brand inconsistency and extended to the organization's global affiliates. Placeholder copy written during the wireframe phase became one of their actual taglines.
A content strategy built to scale
A comprehensive keep, cut, and combine exercise transformed hundreds of unwieldy pages into a focused, navigable site structure with a clear path for growth as the organization evolves.
A CMS the marketing team actually owns
The new site was built on Gutenberg blocks, giving the marketing team full control to create, update, and manage content without routing requests through a developer.
Integrated donor and volunteer journeys
We rebuilt the Classy donation experience as a fully embedded flow with proper GA4 conversion tracking and integrated Formstack for volunteer applications, creating seamless end-to-end journeys for both key audiences.
Your team was able to read the room and the energy and the value proposition of All Hands and Hearts, because in the end, it's our baby, and you want to make sure your baby is in good hands.
The Results
Better experience for admins and users.
A brand with a life beyond the website
The refreshed identity has become a thread through everything All Hands and Hearts puts out, already showing up in their lastest annual report and conference presence as they reposition as a leading global humanitarian organization.
A marketing team that moves at the speed of disaster response
AHAH team members publish new content quickly while responding to new disasters, and board requests that once took days get actioned the same day.
A fundraising tool hidden in plain sight
The development team uses the What's New page daily to pull current field stories and share them directly with donors, turning web content into an active part of the donor relationship.
180% growth in organic social traffic
Within seven weeks of launch, organic social traffic grew 180%, driven by a content strategy the new site was finally built to support.
Built to the standards that matter
The new site passed Google's Core Web Vitals assessment and outperformed every benchmark AHAH specified in their RFP.
92
Accessibility score WCAG 2.2 AA compliant
96
Best Practices score Google Lighthouse
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