case study
A Blueprint for the Community Development Partnership
How 118Group helped CDP turn years of organic growth and a major leadership transition into a clear, costed plan for its next website.
Project Details.
Services Provided.
Stakeholder Discovery & Audience Mapping
Information Architecture & Navigation Strategy
Content Audit & Page Inventory
Technology Ecosystem Mapping
Design Direction & Visual Identity Workshops
Proposal Scoping & Roadmap Development
The Client.
The Community Development Partnership is the lead organization serving the Lower Cape and Outer Cape, working at the intersection of affordable housing, small business support, and regional advocacy. CDP develops and manages affordable rental housing, counsels first-time home buyers, runs technical-assistance programs for small business owners, and leads regional systems-change work through the Lower Cape Community Housing Partnership.
By late 2025, CDP had reached a turning point. A new strategic plan was reshaping how the organization presents itself — moving from a housing-focused nonprofit toward a recognized regional economic development organization. A leadership transition was bringing in a new Executive Director. Project 365, the resident-advocacy arm, was being reinvigorated. And the existing website — built years earlier and grown one page at a time — was no longer keeping pace with where the organization was going.
CDP knew it needed a new digital home. What it needed first was a plan.
The Challenge.
CDP’s existing website wasn’t broken so much as outgrown. A decade of organic additions had produced familiar symptoms:
- A navigation structure that couldn’t hold the organization. The current menu carried too many items at the top level, mixed one-off flyers and inactive pages with priority programs, and made it hard for visitors to locate even high-traffic content.
- Pillars that weren’t legible. CDP’s three program areas — housing, small business, advocacy — weren’t reflected in the site’s organization. Advocacy in particular was underrepresented despite being a strategic priority.
- Manual workflows behind the scenes. Event registration required dual page creation. Workshop sign-ups were hand-entered into Excel. Zoom links and post-event surveys were sent one by one. Salesforce, Constant Contact, and the donation platform weren’t talking to each other.
- Audiences who think differently than the site is organized. A first-time home buyer, an affordable-housing applicant, a small business owner, and a donor all need very different things — and each was navigating the same generic menu.
CDP’s leadership also recognized something many organizations don’t: that putting a price tag on a redesign without first understanding the full scope was a recipe for surprise. They wanted a plan before a proposal.
The website over time has just become this unruly vine of a bush that’s grown every which way — instead of being really organized, consciously bringing people through the user experience with the end goal in mind for all of them.“
Our Focus.
CDP didn’t come to 118Group asking for a website. They came asking for a plan. The Blueprint engagement was designed to deliver three things every full-build project should start with — but rarely does.
Clarity on what’s actually being built.
Before anyone could quote a redesign, both teams needed to know what was on the table: how many pages, organized around which pillars, serving which audiences, with what kinds of templates. The Blueprint produced a complete information architecture grounded in user journeys, not internal org-chart logic.
A real map of CDP’s technology, not a guess.
CDP’s day-to-day runs on Salesforce, Constant Contact, a donation platform, an event tool, and a half-dozen forms. How many of these talk to each other. Most don’t. The Blueprint surfaced where the friction was, what could be automated, and what needed a deeper discovery before anyone could responsibly scope a fix.
A design and brand direction the team had already aligned on.
Rather than designing in a vacuum and presenting options, the Blueprint walked CDP leadership through visual-direction decisions while the architecture work was still in flight — so that by the time a proposal was on the table, the team had already chosen its lane: bright, colorful, graphical, forward-looking.
The Highlights.
Eight stakeholder sessions, one shared map.
CDP doesn’t fit into a single program bucket. Property management, first-time home buyer counseling, small business technical assistance, regional advocacy through Project 365, and donor relations each have distinct audiences, distinct workflows, and distinct content needs. Over the course of the Blueprint, 118Group ran dedicated discovery sessions with the leads of each area, plus broader leadership conversations covering donor strategy, advancement, and the organization’s evolving vision.
The output wasn’t just notes. Each session fed directly into the architecture, the page inventory, and the audience journeys that would later anchor the proposal.
A technology ecosystem map that respects what already works.
Rather than recommending a wholesale platform swap, the Blueprint audited CDP’s existing tools and flagged where each was a keeper, where one needed re-architecting (Salesforce), and where a replacement was warranted (the current donation experience). It also identified the workflows where automation would return the most staff time — workshop registration topped the list — and structured the technology scope into two phases: architectural foundations first, integrations and automation second.
A navigation structure built around audiences, not org charts.
The Blueprint moved CDP from a single overstuffed menu to a 4-part navigation system:
1. A header that surfaces CDP’s core work pillars and highlights a clear donor CTA button.
2. A utility bar for cross-cutting destinations like Events, News, Contact, and Search.
3. Drop-down menus for each of the header’s core work areas.
4. A robust footer that give motivated users a clear path to pages like Properties, Careers, and Reports.
The sitemapping process worked through multiple options for site structure, so CDP leadership could choose between audience-, topic-, and bucket-based organization systems.
A design direction inspired by the strategic roadmap and chosen by the team.
Through a set of visual-identity workshops, the Blueprint walked CDP through palette options, photography vs. illustration trade-offs, sub-branding questions for named programs like Project 365, and prioritization of nice-to-haves like interactive maps and ambient video. By the end, CDP leadership had aligned on a colorful, graphical, forward-looking direction — and a clear list of what was a priority versus what could wait.
Key Deliverables.
By the end of the Blueprint, CDP had four artifacts that turned a years-long question — “what does our new website need to be?” — into a costed, scheduled, scoped plan.
A Complete Information Architecture & Sitemap
A proposed sitemap covering every page the new site will include, organized by pillar, with template assignments and page counts that directly drive scope. The architecture is designed to scale: when CDP launches new programs or initiatives in the next five to ten years, they fit into a framework that already has room for them.
A Technology Ecosystem Map
Current-state documentation of CDP’s tools, with a clear assessment of what stays, what gets re-architected, and what gets replaced — plus a phased plan for integration and automation.
A Visual Direction & Brand Roadmap
A documented design direction covering palette, photography approach, sub-branding decisions, and a prioritized list of visual elements — ready to inform either a refreshed brand or a fuller rebrand engagement when CDP is ready.
A Detailed, Grounded Project Proposal
The full-build proposal that followed the Blueprint was costed against real numbers — real page counts, real templates, real integrations — not estimates. Every line item traces back to something CDP’s own team identified during the Blueprint.
Why a Blueprint First.
CDP’s engagement reflects how 118Group runs every major website project: with a plan before a proposal. The metaphor is straightforward — you don’t show up to a construction site with a backhoe and start digging. You show up with a blueprint first.
Without a blueprint.
With a blueprint.
For CDP, the Blueprint surfaced the right questions at the right time — the rebrand conversation, the Project 365 storytelling approach, the donor experience priorities, whether to invest in a full visual identity overhaul or stage it later. All of these got asked and answered before they could derail a build.
Interested in Results Like These?
If your organization is staring down a website redesign and isn’t sure where to start — or has been burned by a project that started before its scope was understood — a Blueprint engagement is designed for exactly this moment.