CONCEPT STUDY. Rootwork Gardens is a fictional business I created to demonstrate my process on a real-world problem. The research, design, and build are 100% real. The company isn’t. No results are claimed; judge the thinking.
Rootwork Gardens: one small site, three audiences, zero budget for confusion
One small nonprofit site serving donors, volunteers, and members. Accessibly.
The client
A fictional urban-gardening nonprofit running twelve community garden plots: funded by small donors, powered by volunteers, serving neighborhood families on a waiting list. Run by two part-time staff drowning in coordination emails.
The problem
Most nonprofit sites try to speak to everyone at once and end up as a wall of mission statements. Rootwork’s three audiences (donors, volunteers, plot applicants) arrive with completely different intents, and every confused visitor becomes an email the staff has to answer.
The one job
Route each visitor to their action (donate, volunteer, or apply) in one click.
Design decisions
Audience triage in the hero. Three clear doors, “Donate”, “Volunteer”, “Get a plot”, above the fold. The mission statement supports the choice; it doesn’t replace it.
Donation UX built on behavioral defaults: preset amounts, monthly giving as the default toggle, and impact equivalences (“$25 = seedlings for one family plot for a season”) so numbers feel like outcomes.
Accessibility as a mission requirement, not a checkbox: WCAG AA contrast, full keyboard navigation, semantic structure, meaningful alt text. A community organization’s site should be usable by the whole community, including older donors and screen-reader users.
Stories over statistics-theater. A CMS-driven “From the plots” section with short, honest impact stories. No inflated dashboards, just names, faces, and vegetables.
A volunteer flow that kills the email backlog: structured signup with shift preferences, feeding a simple automated confirmation. Designed around the staff’s workload, not just the visitor’s.
Maintainable by volunteers: a small design system with locked components, so anyone can update content without breaking the layout.
The build
Webflow CMS for stories, events, and garden locations; donation-platform integration; form automations for volunteer routing; AA-audited color and type system.
What I’d measure
Donation conversion and monthly-giving share, volunteer signups completed without staff intervention, plot applications, and, the sleeper metric, staff hours saved on email.
What this means for your business
Nonprofits, coworking spaces, clubs, congregations: if your site serves several audiences on a small budget, this is the approach. Tell me about your project.