Nonprofit, 2025–26. Design, build, and staff training. Live.
Sun City West Foundation
I built a website and staff dashboard for a community foundation that runs events, lends equipment, and recruits volunteers.
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Where it started
The Sun City West Foundation is a nonprofit in Sun City West, Arizona. It runs events, rents meeting rooms, lends equipment, sends a newsletter, and recruits volunteers, with a small staff and a lot of spreadsheets. I designed and built the public website, built the dashboard the staff use to run the foundation behind it, and trained them on it.
The training call taught me the most. Records saved in the dashboard were set to reach the public site on a five-minute schedule, and to a coordinator who has just hit save, five minutes of nothing reads as broken. On the same walkthrough, a coordinator said she didn't want to open every card to find what she was looking for. Both changed the build, and both are below.
What made it hard
- The staff are coordinators, not IT people. If a workflow needs a manual to explain it, it won't be used.
- Donations and ticketing go through a third-party vendor whose own email tooling broke twice during the engagement. What the vendor breaks, the dashboard can't fix.
- The dashboard runs on an edge platform, which serves pages from close to the visitor but can't load the usual server add-ons, so even password hashing had to be written against the browser's built-in cryptography.
What I built
Saving a record publishes the page
Events, rooms, resources, and newsletters are written in the dashboard and pushed to the public site on a schedule. After the training call showed that a five-minute wait reads as broken to someone who just hit save, I added a publish-now button beside save. The schedule stays for the people who'd rather not think about it. Under the hood, the public site is on Webflow and the dashboard writes into Webflow's content system, which is what makes "save here, appears there" work.
A list instead of a wall of cards
The dashboard opened onto cards. A coordinator said she didn't want to open every one of them to find what she needed, so a list view went in the week after the walkthrough. It's a small change, and it came straight from watching the staff use the thing.
Share links instead of accounts
A partner who needs a list of volunteer leads shouldn't need a dashboard login to see it. Reports, agreements waiting for a signature, and idea boards can each be opened with a private link, read-only, no sign-in. Fewer accounts for the staff to manage and fewer passwords to reset. The link carries a long random token, which is what stands in for the login.
What isn't measured
- Whether the list view actually replaced the click-through is one person's word, not a number. Nothing in the dashboard is tracked.
- Newsletter opens and clicks live with the email vendor and were never brought into the reports.
- A template bug put a wrong year in the public site's footer. My own site now has a check for exactly that, because this one shipped.
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See for yourself
The public site. The dashboard is behind a login and isn't shown.
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