Non-profit

Built on honor

Client: Tunnel to Towers Foundation

Year: 2021

Tags:

Managed Hosting, UX/UI Design, Full-Stack Development, SEO, Shopify, Social Media

Tunnel to Towers goes on national TV regularly, and every time they do, hundreds of thousands of people flood the site within minutes. That used to crash it. Thanks to Waypoint, now it holds without a flicker. The internal team publishes content on their own schedule, no developer delay. And the Shopify store that once couldn't connect with its own donors has cleared $1M in sales at a 6.89% conversion rate

Tunnel to Towers is a non-profit dedicated to honoring firefighter Stephen Siller, who laid down his life on September 11, 2001. The foundation provides mortgage-free homes to families of fallen first responders and Gold Star families, and custom smart homes for injured veterans.

Their website operated on an unmanaged server with outdated software that crashed during peak donation windows. The backend was so complex that simple text changes required technical expertise, creating a massive update delay.

The organization was also split between two domains, tunnel2towers.org and t2t.org, causing donor confusion and SEO friction.

396,835 Sessions (↑88%)

$1,073,055 Total Sales (↑74%)

29,053 Total Orders (↑189%)

6.89% Conversion Rate (↑60%)

11,837 New Customers from
Donor Campaign

5-13% Email CTR
(1-2 campaigns/week)

We moved the domain to t2t.org and set them up on managed hosting, so the site could scale on its own during traffic spikes instead of someone manually adjusting resources every time they went on TV.

We dug into how people actually used the site, where they clicked, where they dropped off, and mapped every program the foundation runs to figure out a clearer way to organize it all. Then we rebuilt the backend so anyone on the team could make updates themselves, no delay. The site went live with SEO baked in from the start, so when they're ready to push organic growth, the code won't need to be touched.

Tunnel to Towers’ merch store was live but struggling. Most of their donors were over 55 and had only ever given through direct mail, which meant the store had no email list to work with.

We built a custom Shopify app around a simple idea: include a QR code in the foundation’s regular newsletter, let donors scan it, pick a free thank-you gift, and check out through a flow that finally captured their contact info and gave them a discount code for next time.

The whole experience was designed for people who aren’t necessarily comfortable shopping online. It brought in 11,837 new customers.

The whole experience was designed for people who aren't necessarily comfortable shopping online.
It brought in 11,837 new customers.

With that customer list in hand, we set up a regular email program. We handle design, creation, and launch, the client follows their content guidelines and spends about 10 minutes per campaign reviewing a test email before giving us the green light.

We’ve been sending 1 – 2 campaigns a week for the past 6 months, averaging 5 – 13% CTR and hitting their ROI targets on day one of each send.

Non-profit