Philanthropy Asia
Jill Wong wanted to give Asia's philanthropists a publication of their own, but past experience with badly designed websites made briefing a web team feel heavier than writing the essays. We built her a WordPress membership platform she calls "easy to work with".
A WordPress publishing platform with tiered membership access that lets a small editorial team inform and engage philanthropists across the region, still publishing new editions today.
What we were solving
Philanthropy Asia is a media platform for philanthropists in the region, founded by Singapore philanthropist Jill Wong on a simple premise: for philanthropists, by a philanthropist. The problem she saw wasn't a shortage of information about giving in Asia. It was the opposite. There was too much of it, and none of it distributed clearly enough for the people writing the cheques.
The publication needed a home online with unusual requirements for a content site. Articles, features and reports would sit behind a registration wall, but not a blunt one: full access for registered members, and a friendlier arrangement for the people members wanted to share articles with. A small editorial team, not a web team, would run it day to day.
There was a human challenge underneath the technical one. Jill had been burned by badly designed websites before, and briefing a roomful of developers weighed on her. She needed a partner who could hear what she wanted and translate it, without making her learn the vocabulary first.
How we tackled it
Access control designed around generosity, not a paywall
Philanthropy circles run on personal introductions, so a hard registration wall would have choked the publication's natural growth. We configured Paid Memberships Pro with tiered levels: registered members get full access to every article, while friends of members get a 30-day guest pass to read before deciding to join. Each level has its own registration flow and email notifications, so the system does the welcoming without anyone on the team lifting a finger.
That structure turns every member into a distribution channel. Sharing an article with a fellow philanthropist is an invitation, not a locked door.
A publishing system the founder's team can run
The site is a custom WordPress theme built on Beaver Builder, with Advanced Custom Fields structuring the editorial content so publishing an article means filling in fields, not assembling pages. The design carries the brand's editorial feel, including the Brandon Grotesque typeface, with a homepage that surfaces features and key themes and navigation that moves readers from landing to reading in as few steps as possible.
Weekly update calls kept Jill and her team inside the process without drowning them in technical detail. When the project needed something from them (content, the webfont licence, a decision), it arrived as a plain-English request with a due date, not a ticket.
What we delivered
Philanthropy Asia now publishes features, reports and profiles organised into editions on the platform it launched in 2024, with the Advocates registration system live and readers signing up as members, friends or guests. The editorial team files and publishes its own articles, and Chillybin continues to look after the site under ongoing maintenance.
The measure of the build is that it disappeared. Two years on, the founder's energy goes into commissioning writing about ocean protection, healthcare and education giving, not into wrestling her website.
What we learned
Membership tiers are a strategy decision dressed up as a plugin setting. The 30-day friend pass came from understanding how this audience shares (personal recommendation between peers), and it shaped the registration flows, the emails and the reading experience. Configure the same plugin without that understanding and you get a paywall that fights the publication's growth.
The readers use the website. The founder uses the agency. Jill's quote isn't about page templates, it's about being heard. Weekly updates in plain English were as much a part of the deliverable as the code.
Impact & outcomes
Shaan, Roaldo and the team have created for us a website that is aesthetically and functionally top-notch, and easy to work with.
The team behind this project
Roaldo Felipe
Project Manager
Salman Tahir
Junior Designer
Kultar Singh
Senior Designer
Jaypee Ancajas
Web Developer
Shaan Nicol
Director
Leopoldo Suquib
Test Analyst
