Case Study
Transforming Baylor Scott & White Health Foundation’s Digital Presence
Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH) is the largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas, serving 171 counties in North, Central, and West Texas through an extensive network of hospitals, outpatient facilities, and community initiatives. The BSWH Foundations play a crucial role in supporting the healthcare system’s mission by connecting with donors, patients, volunteers, and community partners.
BSWH approached Reaktiv with a significant challenge: their foundation websites needed modernization to better serve diverse stakeholder groups and more effectively support their fundraising efforts. The existing digital presence failed to showcase the impact of the foundations and created barriers to engagement rather than pathways to connection.
Project Overview
The scope of this project encompassed a complete redesign of multiple BSWH Foundation websites, creating a cohesive yet adaptable digital ecosystem that would serve the unique needs of each foundation while maintaining brand consistency across the system.
What was appealing about this project was the potential for storytelling. The stories were already there (powerful accounts of patients, caregivers, and community impact), but they lived in PDF newsletters and were disconnected from any meaningful next steps. One of our goals was to bring these stories forward and tie them more clearly to opportunities for giving.
Challenges and Solutions
Challenge: Fragmented User Experience
Through our discovery process we identified significant user experience inconsistencies across foundation sites. Each foundation had developed its own approach to digital presence, which introduced inconsistencies in navigation, content organization, and style.
Our solution was to build a common information architecture flexible enough to accommodate the needs of each foundation while maintaining patterns and content structures. This approach allowed us to provide some consistency for users who might interact with multiple foundations while respecting each foundation’s approach to community engagement.
Challenge: Content Strategy for Multiple Audiences
Our user persona development revealed distinct audience groups including board members, corporate partners, hospital administrators, and individual donors, each with different informational needs and motivations.
We developed a content strategy that addressed these diverse needs through clear pathways and intuitive nagivation labels. Board members, for instance, can access a special portal that contains meeting materials and impact metrics, while potential donors are presented with a clear path from inspiring patient stories to options for giving.
Challenge: Shifting From Institutional Needs to Human-Centered Stories
Traditional fundraising websites often lead with institutional needs, a model that can feel transactional and impersonal. The challenge was to shift this dynamic: to move from a needs-based presentation to one that centers human stories and lived experiences.
This approach involved rethinking the entire structure of the site, making stories the primary entry point and connecting them directly to giving opportunities. We also empowered donors by showing them needs as opportunities to lead with their dollars and support areas that were meaningful to them, and with which they had connected through storytelling.
Innovative Features
Digital-First Compass Newsletter
The Compass newsletter had previously lived in static PDFs, which limited its reach and flexibility. We rebuilt it as a digital-first experience using a custom post type and reusable block patterns. The new Compass features curated stories, leadership messages, and visual elements like data charts, all organized in a structured, mobile-friendly layout. This makes it easier for teams to update, share, and reuse content while delivering a more engaging and consistent reader experience.
Content Sharing Across the Network
To make better use of editorial capacity across the organization, we introduced a content sharing system on top of a WordPress multisite network that allowed foundations to reuse stories created by other teams. This helped shift the burden of content creation to the larger, more resourced editorial teams while still giving every foundation access to fresh, high-quality stories. Built on top of the Distributor plugin, the system made it easy to pull in content from any connected site, keep it up to date, and credit the original source. It supported a rising-tide approach, where stronger storytelling could lift the entire network.
Mission Events as Minisites
Many fundraising campaigns and events needed a dedicated space that still felt connected to the larger brand. We created a custom post type called Mission Events to support this need. Each Mission Event acted like a lightweight minisite, with its own visual identity, content structure, and navigation. Editors can promote upcoming events, embed registration forms, and archive materials after the event, all within a flexible template that keeps the experience consistent without feeling cookie-cutter.
Personalized Link Sharing
To support and enhance the personal connection between development officers and donors, we developed a feature allowing foundation staff to create unique, token-loaded URLs with customized notes when sharing stories with donors. While impact stories stand on their own, context is what helps development officers connect storytelling with ongoing philanthropic conversations.
Timeline
Many of the foundation’s most powerful stories unfold over long periods of time. To help editors present this kind of narrative, we introduced a timeline feature that allowed them to build chronological stories directly in the WordPress block editor. Each item in the timeline includes a title, year, description, link, and features an image or a video.
Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
To guide visitors toward meaningful action, we developed a custom CTA system. Editors can create and manage calls-to-action as a dedicated post type and place them throughout the site using a custom Gutenberg block. These CTAs can be reused and tracked, giving teams a consistent way to connect content with giving, volunteering, or event sign-ups.
Results and Benefits
The redesigned foundation websites delivered significant improvements for BSWH:
- Greater opportunity for engagement with page and articles through optimized storytelling blocks and templates
- Clear pathways to giving, through stories and areas to support
- Expanded storytelling capacity through tools like timeline blocks, CTAs, and digital-first newsletters
- Improved search engine visibility thanks to more structured, accessible content replacing PDF archives
- Empowered editorial teams teams to maintain their own content without third-party help, eliminating delays in publication
- Improved user experience across all device types
- Greater visibility for foundation areas to support and impact, strengthening community connections
- More effective integration with fundraising systems to bring giving forms closer to the stories and the areas to support
- Future-ready platform built on scalable WordPress architecture with room to grow across the network
Conclusion
The BSWH Foundation website redesign demonstrates how thoughtful digital strategy can advance healthcare philanthropy. By creating an experience that balances system-wide consistency with foundation-specific flexibility, we helped BSWH better connect with donors and strengthen community support for their healthcare mission.
The tools and features we built took into consideration the size and bandwidth of the teams maintaining the sites, with ways for larger teams to support smaller ones by sharing content across the network.
This project highlights Reaktiv’s capability to manage complex, multi-site redesigns while responding to the unique needs of healthcare philanthropy. By combining scale with tools for emotional storytelling, we empowered BSWH Foundation teams to succeed in their mission to care for individuals, families, and communities throughout Texas.