The Bus Stops Here Foundation: two websites were competing for the same donation

The short version

The foundation had two websites. The one for their biggest fundraiser ranked well and sold out every year, and donors were landing on it and giving there instead of to the foundation.

We folded the event into the foundation’s site, redirected the old domain so its search equity carried over, and fixed a handful of things that had been quietly costing them donations.

The situation

The Jerome Bettis Bus Stops Here Foundation has been working with Pittsburgh kids since 1997. The Blue & Gold Celebrity Golf Classic is their signature event. It sells out on its own, with no marketing.

Because it was so established, it had its own website on its own domain. That sounds like a strength. In practice it split the organization in half. Someone would search the event, find the event site, and donate from there, when the foundation is what they meant to support. Two brands, two hosting bills, and a donation flow that depended on which one you happened to find.

Meanwhile the foundation’s own site had gone stale in ways that are easy to miss from the inside. A retired campaign was still running as the homepage banner, so an active organization read as one that had stopped doing things. Programs were not rendering. The newsletter signup returned an error to anyone who tried it. And on a phone, the donate button was missing entirely, which is the single worst place for a nonprofit to have a bug.

What we decided

One site, not two. The event became a section of the foundation site rather than a destination of its own. Everything a sponsor or attendee needs is there, and the donate path is the foundation’s.

Keep the domain, redirect it. This was the part worth being careful about. “Blue and Gold Classic” ranks, and years of links point at that domain. Killing it outright would have thrown that away. Instead the domain stays registered and every URL on it now redirects into the new event page, so the search equity and anyone’s old bookmarks land where they should. The hosting for it is gone; only the redirect remains.

Fix the bugs first, quietly. The mobile donate button, the newsletter form, the Programs page. None of that was interesting work and none of it was in the original scope, but a foundation whose donate button is invisible on a phone has a bigger problem than its design.

Cut what had ended. Retired campaigns came off. What is left is what they are actually doing now, which turned out to be the fastest way to make the site feel current.

The turns

The consolidation was an easier sell than I expected, because Beth had already noticed the donor confusion. She had the diagnosis; she needed someone to say the event site should stop existing as a separate thing. That is often the whole job.

The harder part was restraint. It would have been easy to build sponsor management, per-year galleries, and a full event platform. But the event sells out on repeat sponsors and referrals. It does not have a marketing problem, so building it a marketing system would have been spending donor money on something that solves nothing. Basic event info, the sponsorship PDF they already had, and photos. That is it.

Where it landed

One site. One hosting bill. A donate button that works on a phone. A newsletter form that does not error. The Blue & Gold Classic still owns its search results, but every one of those searches now arrives at the foundation.