Groundswell

‍Industry: Corporate giving and employee relief
‍Location: Los Angeles, California
‍Partnership: 2+ years, ongoing
‍Services: Webflow rebuild, CMS architecture, component system, ongoing support

The background

Groundswell is a corporate giving and employee relief platform. When a disaster hits, employees at a partner company can apply for funding through it, so the marketing site has to carry the weight of a serious, established business. The company is four years old and competes with names that have been around for fifteen or twenty. The site has to close that gap on the first impression.

"It used to be that every new page was a big challenge. Now we have a template and a process to follow, so it isn't a fight anymore. We know what to do and we can just keep building."

— Sarah Kuntsal, Head of Product Marketing, Groundswell

The challenge

By the time Sarah took over marketing, the site had been built in-house and had outgrown its own structure. Hundreds of pages had piled up, many of them never foldered or linked from the navigation, with duplicate content copied from one page to the next. New pages would surface that no one was tracking. Knowing what to update, and where it lived, had become guesswork.

The original build was the right call for a smaller company. Groundswell had simply outgrown it.

What we did

We rebuilt the site in place. The goal was not a new look. It was a structure the marketing team could operate without us.

• Reorganized everything into clean, clearly named folders, so the back end is navigable again
• Rebuilt around reusable components, so common sections drop in instead of being recreated each time
• Moved page creation onto templates, so a new page starts from a working layout
• Set up a CMS for case studies, so adding one takes minutes
• Centralized shared elements like client logos and partner badges, so a single edit updates them site-wide
• Rebuilt the navigation around how visitors actually look for information
• Handed it over with short video walkthroughs the team keeps as a reference

The results

The clearest measure of the rebuild is who runs the site now: one marketer, with no Webflow background and no developer on call. Content updates, new product screenshots, a new client logo, a fresh case study, all of it happens in-house. Because components and templates carry the design, the team builds new pages without starting from zero. Because logos and badges are managed centrally, one change ripples across the whole site. And because everything is named and foldered, finding what to update is no longer a hunt.

"It went from every new page being 'oh no, another big request' to 'I can do this, give me a day.' The site was built around reusable components and templates, so I'm not starting from scratch every time. And I'm not even a Webflow expert."
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— Sarah Kuntsal, Head of Product Marketing, Groundswell

The change that matters most is speed. A new page used to be a multi-day project the team dreaded. Now it is about a day of work, and it belongs to the team rather than sitting in someone else's queue.

• New page turnaround down from a multi-day project to about a day
• A non-technical marketer runs the site solo, with no developer
• One edit updates logos and badges across the entire site
• Case studies publish in minutes through the CMS

The partnership

The site was built to be handed over, and it has been. Groundswell's team owns the day to day: pages, content, case studies, campaign updates. We stay on hand for the work that gets complex, new components and new templates, so the site keeps scaling without another rebuild every couple of years.

"My favorite part is the little things. Our badges and logos live in one place, so I update one and it updates everywhere across the site. Before, nothing was organized and I'd constantly find pages I didn't even know existed"

— Sarah Kuntsal, Head of Product Marketing, Groundswell