Burt Foundation

The Nathan B. and Florence R. Burt Foundation has funded early childhood education and high school completion in Colorado since 1984. The website was a few pages of text under a stock skyline, and the grant process ran through email with no systemized process. The rebuild came in two parts: a grant portal on Next.js and Supabase, and a website as a custom-coded block theme in WordPress, which holds the layout and design fixed and lets the client edit the copy and imagery.

The board was running a community logo contest, so the identity had to work with a mark nobody had drawn yet. We decided on a modular visual style that could be molded to fit future design decisions. I presented the board with 11 palettes to choose from, and navy and amber won.

Later, the logo contest yielded a mountain-themed logo in off-brand Colorado flag colors, with educational motifs. I worked with the designer, Jessica Retskin, to bring it into the system. The mountain stayed, the colors moved to the navy and amber, and the motifs were removed to allow the site’s established typography to shine.

An applicant comes to the site with three questions: when is the window, am I eligible, and how do I apply. The homepage answers the first right under the hero, with the current cycle’s dates. The Grants page answers the second with six criteria to check off, then walks through the process and closes on an FAQ written from the questions applicants actually send. Every one of those paths ends in the portal.

The director keeps it current herself. Every section is locked so she can change the words and images without moving or breaking anything, and the board roster lays itself out for however many people are on it.

To approach building the grant portal methodically, we first explored the current grant process: applications split across reviewers by hand, no standardization or rubric, ineligible organizations got all the way to a decision, no record of who had been awarded what, grant cycles changing year by year, and more.

After understanding in-depth the foundation’s grant cycle structure, we built a comprehensive feature list enabling the director and board members to systemically participate in the grant process: one cycle at a time, LOI first and then invited applications, reviewers judging material from a predefined rubric, simplified eligibility criteria, in-system messaging, an LLM help chatbot with training, and blast email notifications.

The site is live, with the portal linked from every page and six redirects covering every URL the old site had. The director edits copy on the live site herself, and developers have a direct route to it over SSH.