Greater Cincinnati Foundation

Since the 1960s, Greater Cincinnati Foundation has been the community foundation serving southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky, helping people amplify their giving.

Community foundations can be confusing to people: They are combination financial institutions, portals to the nonprofit world, advisors for donors who want their money to have the greatest impact possible. GCF needed a new website that could educate visitors about the category, direct them to understand more of what GCF has to offer, and move them to action — donating or starting a fund. They needed a future-focused tool that could change and flex with the organization as it grows.

Strategic Foundations

A need for flexibility and customization

In the community foundation world, things move really quickly. They’re responsive organizations, after all. GCF needed to be able to build new pages that all feel part of the same system while being as easy to assemble as Lego blocks. That requires a deeply considered, and truly custom design system.

Experience principles

Purposeful and Positive 

The website needs, always, to encourage the visitor to take the first step with optimism.

Clear and self-guided 

Eventually, all engagements with GCF are relational, but visitors are looking to validate and decided to take the next step. That requires absolute clarity.

Polished and Approachable

GCF’s role as a trusted advisor requires that the site reveals the professionalism and warmth they radiate in person.

Energetic and Forward-Looking 

Every design choice has to highlight GCF’s innovative side while also reflecting their stability.

An infographic titled "Strategic Goals" listing four numbered objectives on a dark background

User journey graphic for a prospective donor: a successful family business owner searches “donor advised funds Cincinnati,” visits GCF’s DAF page, watches a “How DAFs work” video, and clicks “Open a fund.”

The Design System

Beautiful and effective modular system

The site design refined the foundation’s color palette for the web and established a new type hierarchy. While the results of those elements are subtle, the effect is great, allowing visitors to navigate the site with less confusion. Their eyes naturally go to the most important elements on a page, and then they know where to dive down for more information. These elements flow though a unified library of components that can be used across pages.

Promotional graphic for Greater Cincinnati Foundation reading “A future we build together. At the heart of a vibrant region,” with body text about investing in education, housing, and cultural vibrancy, and a button that says “Visit gcfdn.org.”

Advanced Storytelling

Designed for discovery and depth

GCF’s impact is layered and expansive, and the site needed to reflect that richness without overwhelming visitors. We developed a clear, scalable information architecture that organizes content into primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, making the depth of information intuitive and navigable. Clear visual cues and pathways guide visitors deeper when they’re ready, while maintaining streamlined entry points for those seeking quick answers or immediate action. The result is a digital experience that supports both discovery and decisiveness — balancing narrative depth with usability.

Side-by-side mockups of Greater Cincinnati Foundation website pages, including a donor landing page, staff contact page, and tertiary donor page with impact stats and giving information

Case study webpage for Greater Cincinnati Foundation titled “Investing in stable homes and bright futures,” featuring a story about housing stability, impact details, grant amount, and a photo of a community partner at a HOME information table.

Slide titled “Levels of Engagement” showing a website strategy framework with three stages—Level 1: Awareness (donor landing page), Level 2: Engagement (fund selection page), and Level 3: Evidence (impact story page)—illustrated with corresponding Greater Cincinnati Foundation webpage mockups.

Grid of themed homepage content blocks for Greater Cincinnati Foundation featuring headlines like “A place to call home, for all,” “A future we build together,” and “Opportunity for all,” paired with lifestyle and community photography and call-to-action buttons.

Under the Hood

Powerful infrastructure for a complex site

Behind the scenes, GCF's site runs on a completely rebuilt technical foundation. We migrated and cleaned their database — shrinking it by 67% — consolidated years of legacy content into flexible, well-structured post types, and layered on a taxonomy system that gives editors real curatorial control without needing a developer.

We also reduced the plugin footprint from 38 to 11, moved hosting to Upsun with Cloudflare, and made strategic security upgrades, including relocating user data to a dedicated external service to reduce the site's attack surface. The result is a faster, leaner, significantly more secure platform that's built to be maintained with confidence over time.

"Gated Content Functionality” showing a website mockup with a centered form overlay to download a resource (first name, last name, email) and toggles indicating blurred content and gated page settings enabled.

“Content Migration” illustrating transfer of team pages, blog posts, CMS accounts, media library, plugins, and settings into a redesigned Greater Cincinnati Foundation website with a “What’s New” blog layout and article page.

Before-and-after comparison of Greater Cincinnati Foundation’s staff page, showing an older dense grid layout on the left and a refreshed “Our team” page on the right with updated design, filtering options, and cleaner staff cards.

When we migrated their content, we were able to shrink their database by 67%. This is great for security, helps with backups and deployments, and makes the site much simpler to maintain over time.