United Way of Central Iowa launched a redesigned HubSpot CMS site with a county map
The Customer
United Way of Central Iowa serves Polk, Dallas and Warren counties. In August 2024 the organization came to Lynton for a full website redesign on HubSpot CMS. They arrived prepared, with a proposed sitemap, a completed discovery questionnaire and the United Way Worldwide brand guidelines.
The Challenge
The team wanted better ways to show its impact in each county it serves. It wanted the donation page rebuilt for conversion, a resource library to hold its Campaign Toolkit, an events section with registration, and team pages that could be filtered by team.
The site also needed to speak to several audiences at once, and to earn search traffic for the topics the organization wanted to own.
The Solution
We started with discovery. We defined up to four audience groups with goals for each, mapped the path each takes to the site, and recommended a sitemap and homepage architecture. An SEO audit and keyword research followed, with pillar page opportunities, presented to the client in October 2024.
Global styles, a header with dropdowns and the footer were built from the United Way Worldwide brand book. The site runs on Lynton’s starter theme for HubSpot CMS, with custom modules where the content called for them.
The homepage template has a utility nav for News and Events, an optional announcement bar over the hero, a stats section with a background graphic that can be switched on or off, a video module that supports vertical and horizontal video, and a newsletter call to action with a swappable background. The nav buttons and the homepage giving module were built so the team can A/B test the words “Give” and “Donate”.
The Give page was redesigned for conversion. It offers individual and corporate credit-card donations with icons, an impact and testimonial module, more ways to give, and FAQs. On desktop the donation forms open in an iframe; on mobile they open in a new window.
A flex template carries the storytelling modules. An interactive map of Central Iowa highlights each county, and clicking one opens up to three stats for it. A donut chart module takes editable labels, percentages and colors. A team listing driven by HubDB opens a bio pop-up for each person, with an optional second photo for the pop-up, and can be filtered by team. A names module takes a pasted list and splits it into columns. Secondary navigation and breadcrumbs round it out.
The resource library runs on HubDB with topic and type filters, search, an optional featured resource, quick links and card variants with or without images. Blog listing and post templates include an optional featured post. The event listing is also driven by HubDB, and each event landing page carries a registration form, a Google Maps embed and an add-to-calendar option.
We entered up to 45 pages of content in three batches, moved the site from a sandbox into the organization’s main portal, defined the redirects, ran two rounds of user acceptance testing and delivered a one-hour training session. The site launched on January 8, 2025, about five months after kickoff, and the blog posts were migrated by script the same day.
What They Got
The team can now update the county stats, the chart figures, the team listing and the resource library from the editor and from data tables. Events are listed from a table and take registrations through the platform’s own forms. The donation path is shorter and offers both individual and corporate options. The team’s reaction to the flex template and the map, relayed to us during design review, was enthusiastic.
Wrapping Up
The standard on this job was discovery before design: audiences, their paths and keywords first, then nine templates with modules shaped to the content the team actually publishes. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.