The Pinnacle Foundation
The Pinnacle Foundation gives LGBTQIA+ young Australians scholarships and mentors, but its website kept breaking under the donors it depended on. We rebuilt it on WordPress around the donor journey and have run it since.
We took over a fragile site built by another agency, rebuilt it on WordPress around a clear path from first visit to donation, and have hosted it since.
What we were solving
The Pinnacle Foundation is Australia's LGBTQIA+ education charity. It awards multi-year scholarships to students aged 18 to 26 and matches every scholar with a mentor who has walked the same path. It isn't government funded. It runs on donors, corporate partners and more than 200 volunteers, coordinated by fewer than six staff.
A broken page for Pinnacle is a lost scholarship. Chillybin had supported the Foundation's site for several years. Another agency had built it on Visual Composer. It broke often, loaded slowly and was hard to get around. It cost the small team hours of admin and lost donors who wouldn't fight through a poor experience to give money away.
By 2020 the problems had compounded. Most Australians had never heard of the Foundation, and the financial shock of that year cut giving just as scholars were losing jobs and housing. When Pinnacle decided to rebuild, they asked the team already keeping the old site alive.
How we tackled it
Rebuild the platform, keep the partnership
Years of support work meant we knew exactly where the old site failed. We replaced the Visual Composer build with a fresh WordPress platform on Beaver Builder, the combination we trust for sites that non-technical teams run themselves. Pinnacle had also engaged a new branding agency, so we worked with them, taking their visual direction and carrying it through design and development. The brand agency owned how Pinnacle looked. We owned how it worked.
A user flow that ends at donate
Nobody else in Australia does what Pinnacle does, but not enough people knew it. So the site was structured as a journey rather than a brochure. The homepage leads to positioning content that explains who Pinnacle is and why the work matters. From there, scholarship and resource pages show the programme in action (the scholars, the mentors, the outcomes). The journey finishes at a clear call to donate or get in touch. Achievements and the people behind them sit in the flow, not in a buried about page, because for a charity the evidence is the pitch.
Stay for the long haul
Launch was the start of the second phase of the relationship. Pinnacle moved onto our hosting and care plan, and we've maintained the site since: updates, monitoring and the small fixes that keep a volunteer-driven organisation from losing a donor to a broken page.
What we delivered
The Pinnacle Foundation now has a platform that stays up during appeal campaigns and lets a small staff publish without a developer. The structure has grown with the organisation, from annual scholarship rounds through to newer initiatives like the LGBTQIA+ Executive Fellowship run with The University of Sydney Business School.
Six years on, thepinnaclefoundation.org still runs on the WordPress and Beaver Builder platform we built, still under our care plan, still publishing news and events week by week. For a charity with fewer than six full-time staff, a website that keeps working is the fundraising infrastructure.
What we learned
Maintenance is the best discovery process there is. Because we'd spent years fixing the old site, we didn't have to guess what the rebuild needed to solve. We had the support tickets.
For non-profits, user experience is a fundraising issue, not a design preference. Every extra second of load time and every confusing menu is a tax on generosity, paid by the scholars the donation would have funded. If a page didn't move a visitor towards understanding or giving, it didn't earn its place.
