St. Baldrick's
I came to St. Baldrick's sideways, in 2008. A friend was involved and pulled me in, which is how most people get here.
I wasn't a marketer to them. I was a shavee, the name for the people who let someone take clippers to their head in a bar full of strangers to raise money for childhood cancer research. I did it sixteen separate years. Somewhere in there I started volunteering. Eventually I was hosting events.
So I knew what the brand was long before I ever worked on it. I knew it in the room: the noise, the terrible jokes, someone's mother deciding on the spot, unplanned, that she was going to shave too, just because she'd been moved to. Nothing in this work is more powerful than watching that happen.
Which is why, in 2023, when a web role opened that was smaller than the problem I could see, I took it anyway. I'd watched the brand start to lose the thing that made me fall for it. The joy was draining out of it. And I thought I might be the only person applying who could see that from the inside.
Nobody had ever owned the digital presence as a whole. It had been built the way most nonprofit websites get built: as needed, by whoever was there, solving whatever was in front of them that quarter. What I inherited was sediment. Years of half-finished projects from people long gone, no single mind behind any of it.
The deeper problem was the voice. St. Baldrick's fundraising engine is an in-person event in March, and those events are loud, funny, and full of love. The marketing sounded like a form letter. It asked for money without ever making a case, which landed flat with existing donors and did nothing at all for new ones. COVID had taken the events out at the knees, and the base never came back on its own. Rebuilding it was a standing part of the job.
The first ninety days were an Ahrefs audit, top to bottom. I went through the entire inherited ecosystem, killed dead projects and orphaned pages, cut file sizes and unused code, and lifted site health substantially, complicated by a site that is largely user-generated because every volunteer runs their own page.
Consolidated outdated services, which improved site health and cut cost at the same time, then fixed the measurement layer: double-counted sessions, conversions that were broken or stale, and services that weren't speaking to each other. You cannot make a decision on data you don't trust.
Migrated the organization onto HubSpot as its central CRM and tracking system, then built the storytelling to feed it: researcher spotlights and family stories that gave people a specific reason to act. The goal was one continuous experience aimed at both new participants and lapsed ones.
Launched and supported campaigns across the calendar, Send Kids Cancer Packing and National Cancer Survivors Month among them, then carried the visual identity into everything the events actually put in people's hands, from shirts to signage to video.
A decade of well-meaning people had each solved their own problem, and nobody had ever asked what the whole thing was supposed to be. The gap that mattered most wasn't visual. It was between how the events felt and how the marketing sounded.
Closing the gap between the room and the mailing meant deciding what the voice was allowed to do. These four tenets are what came out of it: make what people read sound like what they felt at the event, and then actually ask them for something.
The goofiness isn't decoration on top of a serious cause. It's the reason people come back. A brand built on shaving your head in solidarity should never sound like a hospital bill.
Every ask names what it buys. "Give us money" is not a case. A donor who knows what their gift funds gives again. One who doesn't, doesn't.
Kids are not the pitch. Nobody gets guilted, nobody gets sensationalized. You shave your head because you're standing with someone, not because you feel sorry for them.
Survivors carry the treatment for life. A brand that only talks about cures and never about quality of life is telling half of its own story.
Most childhood cancer organizations run Hero and Caregiver and stop there. St. Baldrick's has a third that nobody else can credibly claim, and losing it was exactly what was going wrong. The tension is the whole brand: the Jester keeps the Hero from turning grim and the Caregiver from turning pitying. Take it out and you're every other cancer charity.
St. Baldrick's is the only childhood cancer organization where the fundraiser is also the statement.
You don't buy a ticket and go home. You walk out visibly changed and carry it around for a month while people ask you why. It funds the research, and the research is the point. But what it actually offers is the rarest thing in this category: permission to laugh. Kids with cancer never got a choice about losing their hair. Everyone in that room chose it, on purpose, in public, and had a genuinely good time doing it. That isn't a fundraising mechanic. It's the most human thing an organization in this space can offer, and nobody else can own it at this scale.
The St. Baldrick's site had organic potential it wasn't capturing. Keyword strategy alone wasn't enough. Search ranking and donor conversion both depend on the same underlying technical health. Page speed, site structure, and metadata were worked together, not in sequence.
A 2-second improvement in average page load time is easy to underestimate. For a nonprofit, it's the difference between a donor completing a gift form and leaving before the page finishes loading.
Ahrefs Site Health from 56 to 91, clearing years of crawl, metadata, canonical, and sitemap debt
Average page load from 4.6s to 2.8s, with Core Web Vitals passing on most core templates
Organic sessions up an average of 125 percent year over year, three years running
You cannot optimize what you cannot see, and the measurement layer had been broken for years without anyone noticing. Sessions double-counted. Conversion events that fired wrong, or never fired at all. Services that had no idea the others existed. Every decision above it was being made on numbers nobody should have trusted.
So I rebuilt it. A full Google Tag Manager implementation, GA4 repaired and made trustworthy, and conversion tracking extended from covering a fraction of the site to nearly all of it. Then standardized dashboards on top, so the organization could answer its own questions without waiting on me to export a spreadsheet. This is the least visible work on the page and the part everything else depends on.
A from-scratch Google Tag Manager build, with 120+ tracked events across the platform
Conversion tracking extended from covering about a fifth of the site to nearly all of it
Standardized marketing dashboards that replaced ad-hoc, manual reporting
Led the migration onto HubSpot as the organization's central CRM and tracking system, consolidating a scatter of disconnected services into one place that could actually see a donor's whole journey. The platform was only half of it. The other half was the nurture sequences, segmentation logic, and storytelling that gave it something worth sending.
The distinction between a donor database and a donor relationship program is the content in between. Segmented sequences for donors, volunteers, and event participants kept each group receiving something relevant, anchored in researcher spotlights and family stories rather than another appeal.
The email and CRM discipline behind this work has its own case study, covering this build alongside two others.
Migrated a scatter of disconnected services onto HubSpot as the central CRM
25+ marketing workflows automated, with lead routing and form capture centralized
Researcher and family-story program built to carry the ask, not decorate it
The Google Ad Grants program gives eligible nonprofits up to $10,000 per month in free search advertising. St. Baldrick's was already enrolled. It just wasn't working. The campaigns bid on terms someone had once decided were the prized ones, without much evidence, and they weren't bringing anyone to the site in a way that mattered. Nothing was wired into GA4 or GTM with any real thought, so there was no way to tell what was or wasn't landing.
I led the SEO side of the audit and the rebuild: making sure the plumbing worked, that the terms we targeted were both relevant and genuinely ownable, and that the grant was being used at something near its actual potential. Getting approved is the easy part. Using it is the work.
The full rebuild, alongside a second grant taken to its cap, has its own case study.
An underused $10k/month grant rebuilt around relevant, ownable search terms
Monthly utilization from about $4k to roughly $9k, near the full grant
Click-through rate more than doubled once targeting and tracking were fixed
A nonprofit site can post a beautiful traffic chart and not fund a single additional day of research. Sessions aren't the product. A completed gift is. Most of my time went into the gap between those two things.
That gap is why the efforts above were one job rather than four. Organic search decided who arrived. The Ad Grants rebuild decided whether the paid half of that traffic had any reason to be there. The analytics layer decided whether we could see any of it clearly enough to act on. HubSpot decided what happened after someone gave. And all of it collapses in the same few places: a gift form that takes too long to load, a visitor who searched for one thing and landed on another, a tracking setup reporting conversions that never happened.
So the work was mostly janitorial. Cutting weight off the templates donors actually transact on. Matching search intent to landing pages on both the paid and the organic side, so the traffic arriving had a reason to stay. Fixing conversion tracking that nobody knew was wrong. Building the researcher and family stories that carried the ask rather than decorating it.
It added up the way that kind of work does, a little at a time. Double-digit lifts in donation and registration conversion on the templates that carry the most traffic, and fewer people leaving the gift funnel before they finished. The page-load improvement reads like a developer's metric. On a donation form, it's a fundraising one.
The role was never only search strategy and dashboards. The foundation had designers. What it didn't have was one person holding the brand and the marketing together, so I took the creative lead as well, and carrying both halves is the part of this job I'm proudest of.
It meant the brand could be lifted as a whole instead of in pieces. Campaign identities, the artwork for the annual head-shaving events, merchandise, print, and signage all ran through the same person writing the search strategy and reading the analytics, so nothing drifted between what people saw and what they were asked to do.
That mattered most on the fundraising calendar. The flagship head-shaving season built around St. Patrick's Day, National Cancer Survivors Month in June, Childhood Cancer Awareness Month in September, and Send Kids Cancer Packing, a newer fundraiser where supporters wear a backpack in solidarity with kids who carry their treatment in one. For each of these I created the visual identity, wrote much of the storytelling, and concepted what the outreach would include.
Social worked the same way. Local events ran their own outreach, so there were four separate channels to feed, each needing assets built for its own audience. Event promos, calls to register, and the head-shave moments themselves, across design, animation, and video.
Most of the fundraising is peer-to-peer, done by volunteers running their own pages, so a good deal of the work was giving them something to run with. Templates, graphics, and assets that let a first-time fundraiser look like they had a marketing team behind them.
Social channels running at once, each with its own assets.
Local events owned their own outreach, so every channel needed art built for its audience without pulling away from the brand.
Brand and digital sat with one person, so the work ran from search strategy and analytics straight through to the campaign art and the shirts people wore to the event.
Organic growth compounds. It doesn't reset every campaign cycle the way paid acquisition does. For a nonprofit with a budget that has to stretch further than a consumer brand's, that distinction matters more than the percentage itself.
And growth in that context wasn't a given. Their engine is an in-person event in March, and COVID shut it down. The base didn't come back on its own, and every peer organization we compared notes with was candid about facing the same slide. We grew anyway, year over year, across the board. Some years only a little. But up, while the people around us were going the other way.
The shirts are the other lesson. For years the event tees had been a logo slapped on a blank, worn once and never again, and for a brand whose engine is people in a room, that's a wasted channel. An event shirt is the most durable piece of outreach a nonprofit produces. Somebody wears theirs for years, and every wear makes the case somewhere no campaign can reach. So I volunteered for the design work, led it my whole time there, and treated the shirts as storytelling rather than merchandise. The one that worked best pulled every part of the organization into a single mark: the head-shaving, the hair donation, the advocacy, the do-what-you-want fundraisers, and the research underneath all of it. Seeing one on a stranger in a grocery store eight months after their event is what brand consistency is for. And because the same person setting the search strategy was deciding what the shirt said, neither one drifted from the other.
Paid Media
Two Ad Grants taken from idle to near the cap, including the paid search behind this page.
Read the case study →
Email & CRM
Three CRM builds at three starting points, from donor re-engagement to a product launch with zero users.
Read the case study →