Bowst Team
Last week the team shipped three major projects back to back: a new marketing site and payments overhaul for Help Hope Live, a full site and brand rollout for Arcadia timed to their biggest event of the year, and the launch of Keolis Network Now. Different industries, different platforms, same team. Here’s what went live and why it matters.
Help Hope Live: the last piece of a much bigger build
Monday’s launch of the new Help Hope Live marketing site was the final, most visible piece of a project that’s been running for months. The new site connects directly to the client portal and the admin portal, so for the first time a donor’s or fundraiser’s journey from the public site through to account management runs on one connected system instead of three separate ones stitched together.
The less visible work is arguably the bigger deal. We moved HHL off Authorize.net and onto Stripe, and built that migration into the custom admin so it now talks directly to MIP for accounting and Raiser’s Edge for donor management. That’s a meaningful simplification for a nonprofit team that previously had to reconcile payment data across systems by hand.
The move to Stripe also let us add Google Pay and Apple Pay as donation options. Early numbers show roughly 60% of donations now coming through one of those two methods. For a medical fundraising platform, where donors are often giving from a phone in a moment of urgency, cutting the steps between “I want to help” and a completed donation matters directly to how much money reaches patients.
If you want to see the new site in action and back the mission behind it, you can donate directly to Help Hope Live or find one of their current campaigns and support someone’s medical fundraiser directly.
Arcadia: a new site, a new theme, and a brand rollout, done in time for Aggregate
The Arcadia.io launch was the bigger lift of the two websites. It’s a WordPress build on a custom theme, built on our new block-based version of BowstPress, and hosted on Pantheon. Arcadia was also running product branding work in parallel, which meant the site build had to absorb and reflect brand decisions that were still being finalized as we built.
We also folded carejourney.com into the main Arcadia site as part of the launch, consolidating two properties into one rather than leaving CareJourney running as a separate, disconnected brand presence.
All of it shipped in time for Aggregate, Arcadia’s annual conference, which kicks off this week. Conference deadlines are unforgiving: there’s no pushing the date when a few thousand attendees and a general session keynote are already on the calendar. Hitting it with a new theme platform, a brand in motion, and a site consolidation in the same window is the kind of project that tests a team’s process as much as its code.
Keolis Network Now: the story we’re still writing
The third launch last week was Keolis Network Now. It’s a strong one, a project the team is genuinely proud of, but the details deserve a fuller writeup than a recap paragraph can give it. We’ll follow up with a dedicated post once we’ve pulled together the full story.
The common thread
Three clients, three platforms (custom portals and payments infrastructure for HHL, WordPress and Pantheon for Arcadia, and more to come on Keolis), three deadlines that didn’t move. What ties them together is a team that can carry a project from the first conversation through to a launch that holds up on day one, and clients who were genuinely good partners to build with. Good collaborators make this kind of week possible.
