CASE STUDY · LPI · 2021–PRESENT

WeConnect

I helped replace a failing nonprofit website product with a white-label site builder, then built the onboarding, templates and training that let a lean team sign 1,000+ websites.

647

sites live

1,000+

website contracts signed

<8 hrs

design team time per site

~6 weeks

from design to training

MY ROLE

Product lead for onboarding, enablement and UX systems (title: UX/UI Designer)

TIMEFRAME

2021 to present; first customers in September 2022

TEAM

Product, engineering, customer service, sales and design

PLATFORM

Duda’s white-label site builder, with onboarding tracked in Salesforce

JUMP TO:

 The Problem · Onboarding · The Platform · Business Model · Challenges · Impact

Summit Center, one of the WeConnect starter templates, on a laptop, tablet and phone. The home page shows a photo of smiling women, the heading Welcome to Summit Center and a button, with icons for newsletter, calendar, volunteer and contact below.

Summit Center, one of the starter templates, on desktop, tablet and mobile.

THE PROBLEM

A product customers couldn’t use, and a business that couldn’t grow

LPi’s legacy website product was failing nonprofits and the team behind it.

  • Hard to customize. Designs came back in as flat images.

  • Poorly documented. Customers and staff worked things out alone.

  • Impossible to scale. Every workaround added tech debt.

  • Inconsistent onboarding and support. No shared process from sale to launch.

  • No room to grow revenue. Sponsored content wasn’t possible.

What we needed

A modern builder that was:

  1. Intuitive for non-technical users

  2. Easy to implement with a lean team

  3. Extensible for future monetization

The legacy WeConnect page editor: an About the Church page whose body is one rich-text box, with a table holding the page title and a long block of parish history text.

BEFORE · EDITING A PAGE

Designs made elsewhere were imported as JPEGs into a text box, leading to broken pages and workarounds.

The legacy WeConnect home page layout tool: a short list of one, two and three column sections and panels such as Staff, Mass Times and Bulletins to drag into a plain grid.

BEFORE · LAYING OUT THE HOME PAGE

Columns and content blocks were limited and hard to understand.

MY ROLE

A designer’s title, a product lead’s job

Officially a UX/UI Designer, I worked as the product lead for onboarding, internal enablement and UX systems, working across product, engineering, customer service and sales.

Platform discovery

Evaluated white-label builders for usability, scale and fit. Research led us to Duda.

Customer journey design

Mapped the full experience, from purchase to setup to long-term use.

Templates and content

Reusable templates and pre-filled content modules to speed setup.

Internal enablement

Trained the internal design team and created subject matter expert (SME) roles.

Customer education

Produced training videos and guides for non-technical customers.

Monetization

Co-led planning for the sponsorship program.

ONBOARDING AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

One journey from signed contract to live site

I mapped every touchpoint from signed contract to live site, and my team built the materials, training and decks for each step.

01

Consultation

A personalized consultation with the web design team

02

Custom design

A design made for the organization

03

Content connection

Content moved over from the old site

04

Training

An interactive training session with the customer’s team

05

Ongoing support

Tech support at every step after launch

Fewer choices, as the process matured

At launch, customers chose from three levels of help, from $199 to $899, and I built content for every scenario. Once the process was proven, we retired the tiers for two simple ways to buy.

CUSTOM WEBSITE

$999

The nonprofit buys its own site

Custom design, content transfer, training and ongoing support.

SPONSORED WEBSITE

$3,000 a year

A local sponsor pays for it

The same website, funded by a local sponsor thanked on the home page.

Customer-facing slide titled All New 5 Step Process, with icons for a personalized consultation, a customized design, connecting all of your content, an interactive training session and ongoing support.

The five-step process, from a customer presentation deck.

WeConnect Website Options handout from launch: you design and transfer content for $199, we design the homepage and you transfer content for $599, or we design your website and transfer content for $899.

The retired launch handout, so each customer could pick the help they needed.

Customer handout for the we design the homepage option, showing three starting points, Summit, Bristol and Jackson, each with a short description, a screenshot and a View Example Site button.

Starting points for a customer who chose to transfer their own content.

THE NEW PLATFORM

A builder customers can use, and a system the team can scale

Duda’s white-label platform ended the fight with tech debt, and customers get new features as they ship. On top of it, I built custom templates for the design team and a library of modular sections: about 120 at launch, 250+ today.

The new white-label site builder editing an Our Staff page. Two staff photos with rounded corners and email buttons sit beside an open image design panel with border, corner radius and shadow controls.

AFTER · EDITING A PAGE

Visual, direct and familiar to anyone who has used a modern site builder.

The section library in the new builder, with Blank Text and Image templates such as Three Column Text and Three Column Text Highlight, and a preview of a three-column section on a demo church site.

AFTER · THE SECTION LIBRARY

A sample of the pre-designed sections I created. Theme colors and fonts flow in; layouts stay consistent.

A NEW BUSINESS MODEL

Community sponsors fund the website

Many customers are nonprofits with little cash but strong local support. So in early 2025, we introduced site sponsorship.

  1. A local sponsor pays. Usually a small business, it funds the site and its upkeep.

  2. The sponsor is thanked publicly. The nonprofit’s home page recognizes them.

  3. Everyone gets a better deal. $3,000 a year from a sponsor, versus $999 from a nonprofit, grows revenue and keeps the product within reach.

A sponsored nonprofit website for Westerly Senior Center. A home page banner reads This website brought to you by Maryellen from PACE-RI, with a thank-you message to the community partner and a Visit Website button.

A sponsored site, with the sponsor thanked on the home page.

BUMPS ALONG THE WAY

What made it hard, and what we did

A lean team

The new product had to launch and run without a large engineering or support staff.

CHANGE A white-label platform instead of a custom build, starter templates for the design team, and SME roles so questions had an owner.

Every customer was different

Budgets, timelines and in-house skills varied widely across nonprofits.

CHANGE Three service options at launch, each with its own materials and process, later simplified to a custom site or a sponsored one.

Non-technical customers

Most customers weren’t web professionals, and the old platform had taught them to expect a fight.

CHANGE Pre-filled content modules, training videos and guides, and a live training session for every customer.

Customers with little cash

Many nonprofits needed a better website but couldn’t pay for one.

CHANGE Community sponsorship, which lets local supporters fund the site.

IMPACT

The new platform fully replaced the old one

Contract and onboarding data from Salesforce, as of January 21, 2026.

1,000+

website contracts signed

647

sites live

375

contracts supported by a sponsor

123

sponsored sites live

~6 weeks

the turnaround we can promise, from design to training

<8 hrs

average design team time per website

~0

support needed after launch, down dramatically

250+

modular sections in the library, up from about 120 at launch

  • Much less training. More of onboarding is self-serve.

  • Fewer escalations. Teams lean on docs and SME roles instead.

Salesforce donut chart of WeConnect contract status by stage as of January 21, 2026: about 1,100 contracts in total, 647 at site live, 153 at training complete, 75 waiting on the customer and 54 returned to sales.

All website contracts by onboarding stage.

Salesforce donut chart of WeConnect sponsored site sales by stage as of January 21, 2026: 375 in total, 123 at site live, 93 at training complete, 54 waiting on the customer and 38 in content transfer.

Sponsored site sales by onboarding stage.

CONCLUSION

A product a lean team could sell, launch and support

WeConnect went from a platform customers worked around to one they use on their own. Duda supplied the builder; everything around it was designed in-house.

  • Buy the platform, design the experience. Duda ended the tech debt; onboarding made it work.

  • Design for every scenario, then simplify. Clear options launched it; fewer choices made it easier to buy.

  • Enable the team. Docs and SME roles let a small team support a growing base.

  • Let the community fund the mission. Sponsorship turned local goodwill into revenue.

See it in action: a demo parish site built on WeConnect, shown on desktop, tablet and phone.

View the demo site

WeConnect · Megan Russell · UX/UI Designer

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