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 it is still running on our build, and our care, years later).
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 and maintained it ever since.
The Challenge
What we were solving
The Pinnacle Foundation is Australia's LGBTQIA+ education charity. Founded in 2007, it awards multi-year scholarships to students aged 18 to 26 for full-time study at Australian public higher education institutions, in any profession, trade or the arts. Every scholar is matched with a mentor who typically shares their academic interests, gender identity and sexual orientation (someone who has walked the same path and can prove it leads somewhere). The Foundation is not government funded. It runs on the generosity of individual donors, corporate partners and a volunteer base of more than 200 people, coordinated by fewer than six full-time staff.
That funding model puts unusual weight on a website. For most organisations a broken page is an annoyance; for Pinnacle it was lost scholarships. Chillybin had been the Foundation's website support partner for several years, maintaining a site built by another agency on Visual Composer. It broke often, loaded slowly and was hard to navigate, costing the small team hours of admin time and, worse, losing contributors who would not fight through a poor experience to give money away.
By 2020 the problems had compounded. Most Australians had never heard of the Foundation, fewer still understood what it did, and the financial shock of that year had cut discretionary giving just as some scholars were losing jobs and housing. When Pinnacle decided to rebuild, they asked the team already keeping the old site alive.
Success meant a site that could grow the donor base beyond the existing community: fast, stable, easy for a tiny team to run, and structured so that a first-time visitor understood the mission and reached a donate button without getting lost.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Rebuild the platform, keep the partnership
Years of support work meant we knew exactly where the old site failed, which is a head start no discovery workshop can match. We replaced the Visual Composer build with a fresh WordPress platform on the Beaver Builder framework, the combination we trust for sites that non-technical teams have to run themselves. Pinnacle had also engaged a new branding agency, so rather than designing in isolation we worked in partnership with them, taking their visual direction and carrying it through into design and development. The brand agency owned how Pinnacle looked; we owned how it worked.
A user flow that ends at donate
The Foundation's real problem was positioning: nobody else in Australia does what Pinnacle does, but not enough people knew it. So the site was structured as a deliberate journey rather than a brochure. The homepage leads to positioning content that explains who Pinnacle is and why the work matters, then on to scholarship and resource pages that show the programme in action (the scholars, the mentors, the outcomes), and finishes at a clear call to action 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, not the end of the first. Pinnacle moved onto our hosting and care plan, and we have maintained the site since: updates, monitoring and the small fixes that keep a volunteer-driven organisation from ever again losing a donor to a broken page.
The Solution
What we delivered
Pinnacle got what the old site never gave them: a platform that stays up during appeal campaigns and lets a small staff publish without a developer. The structure has scaled with the organisation, from annual scholarship application rounds (open 1 July to 31 August each year) through to newer initiatives like the LGBTQIA+ Executive Fellowship run with The University of Sydney Business School.
The quieter proof is durability. Six years on, thepinnaclefoundation.org is still running on the WordPress and Beaver Builder platform we built, still under our care plan, and still publishing news and events week by week. For a charity with fewer than six full-time staff, a website that simply keeps working is not a nice-to-have. It is the fundraising infrastructure.
What we learned
Maintenance is the best discovery process there is. Because we had spent years fixing the old site, we did not have to guess what the rebuild needed to solve; we had the support tickets. Agencies often treat care plans as the low-glamour end of the business, but they are where you learn how a client's website actually fails.
The other lesson is that 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. Framing the rebuild that way kept every decision honest: if a page did not move a visitor towards understanding or giving, it did not earn its place.
