How a Mission-Driven Website Redesign Earned Southlake Health Foundation a 2026 AVA Platinum Award

When Southlake Health Foundation’s new website was recognized with a 2026 AVA Platinum Award, it was an exciting milestone for everyone at STella!. But the award represents something bigger than a beautiful website. It recognizes what happens when digital strategy, purposeful storytelling, and genuine collaboration come together around a mission that matters.

The AVA Digital Awards recognize excellence in digital communication, which spans across the planning, concept, direction, design, and production of digital work. Earning Platinum, the program’s highest distinction, reflects the depth of strategy and craft that went into every layer of this project.

And we feel that this is a story worth telling.

The Challenge: Building a Digital Platform for a Healthcare Foundation

Why Healthcare Foundation Websites Face a Unique Audience Challenge

Southlake Health Foundation had an extraordinary story to tell. As the fundraising arm of one of Canada’s leading community hospitals, the Foundation plays a vital role in powering leading-edge care, close to home — funding advanced equipment, innovative technology, expanded programs, and the kind of compassionate patient care that government funding doesn’t fully cover.

What they needed was a digital platform equal to that story.

Healthcare foundation websites face a unique challenge. They must serve multiple audiences simultaneously: donors, patients, families, volunteers, corporate partners, and community members, while also striking a delicate balance between emotional resonance and practical clarity. A potential donor landing on the site for the first time needs to feel something and understand the mission almost immediately.

When a user visits your website they form their first design impression within seconds — and that window is unforgiving. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group has confirmed this through their various studies. For a healthcare foundation, this means that a donor is forming an opinion, building trust, having an emotional response, and determining your credibility all before they have even read a single sentence.

Digital fundraising grew 11% year-over-year according to the Blackbaud Institute‘s 2025 Trends in Giving report — outpacing overall giving by a wide margin. Therefore, nonprofits cannot continue to treat their website as a secondary channel. A streamlined digital experience isn’t just a convenience for modern donors; it is the primary driver of engagement and growth across the entire nonprofit sector.

44 Years of Community Impact: What STella! Needed to Understand First

$213 Million Raised for Southlake Regional Health Centre Since 1980

Before STella! touched a wireframe, the team needed to understand what Southlake Health Foundation does and what it means to the people it serves.

Since 1980, the Foundation has raised more than $213 million in support of Southlake Regional Health Centre, funding everything from critical medical equipment and infrastructure upgrades to patient programs and staff education. That’s more than four decades of community generosity translated into real, measurable care.

Healthcare giving is deeply personal. People donate because they’ve sat in a waiting room, held someone’s hand through a difficult diagnosis, or benefited from care that changed their life. The new website needed to bring those stories forward, while also making the Foundation’s impact feel human, urgent, and tangible.

The challenge was clear but not easy: turning community impact into a compelling digital story.

Working with a foundation ready to tell its story at that scale? Let’s Talk.

STella!’s Strategy for Nonprofit Website Redesign: Where We Started

How STella! Mapped Audience Needs Before Touching a Wireframe

A successful website build starts long before wireframes and designs. At STella!, we start by understanding the organization, who their audience is, what their current ecosystem looks like, and ultimately, what the website’s main purposes are.

To accomplish this we had deep partner conversations, mapped clear audience needs, and had honest assessments of where their current friction points existed. Only once this was discussed did STella! start focusing on designs.

Mobile Devices Now Drive 28% of Online Donations — What That Means for Design

Once STella! understood the landscape, the team’s focus was to simplify the navigation and reduce the number of steps to meaningful action. Visitors don’t think in organizational departments — they think in questions, needs, and goals. Therefore, the site’s architecture was built around that reality.

Donation paths were made clear and natural, with multiple entry points for people at different stages of their donor journey.

The Blackbaud Institute has stated that mobile devices now account for roughly 28% of all online donations. For a community-facing healthcare foundation, whose donors are vast in scale, failing to deliver a frictionless mobile experience isn’t just a design gap — it is also a fundraising gap.

Content Strategy and Storytelling

Nonprofits have always known the importance of storytelling, and research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts and figures alone. That fact shaped how STella! approached every content decision on the Southlake Health Foundation website — leading with real patient impact, donor stories, and community moments, while letting the statistics serve as proof.

Accessibility and Performance

Accessibility wasn’t treated as a compliance checkbox — it was built into the design foundation from day one.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1 in 6 people worldwide live with a significant disability. On a healthcare foundation website — where visitors may include elderly donors, patients navigating care decisions, and families in high-stress moments — accessibility is not a compliance requirement. It is a baseline condition for serving the people whose support the Foundation depends on. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were applied throughout the build, alongside fast load times, responsive layouts, and a clear content hierarchy that works for every user, on every device.

Why the Client Partnership Was Critical to This Project’s Success

Projects like this don’t succeed on design skill alone. They succeed when both teams are pulling in the same direction.

The Southlake Health Foundation team brought deep knowledge of their donors, their community, and their mission. They were clear about what mattered, open to strategic challenge, and focused throughout the entire process.

That kind of client partnership is rare. When it happens, you feel it in the work.

The AVA Platinum Award belongs to both teams.

What the Southlake Health Foundation Website Delivers Now

There are several outcomes worth highlighting:

A clearer story of impact. Visitors can quickly understand why donor support matters, where it goes, and how it connects to care close to home.

Stronger donor pathways. Whether someone is ready to give, explore a campaign, register for an event, or simply learn more, the next step is always obvious.

A flexible, future-ready platform. The site is built to grow and support new campaigns, stories, fundraising priorities, and community initiatives without friction.

Emotion and usability in balance. The experience is designed to move people while making action easy.

What Makes a Good Nonprofit Website Today?

The Seven Qualities of a High-Performing Nonprofit Website

This is a question worth answering directly, as it applies far beyond Southlake Health Foundation.

• It’s built around the user, not the org chart. Navigation and content should reflect how visitors think, not how the organization is structured internally.
• It makes action easy. Donation buttons, event registrations, volunteer sign-ups — the path to any meaningful action should be obvious and frictionless.
• It builds trust quickly. Clear messaging, strong design, social proof, and transparency all contribute to a first impression that earns confidence.
• It tells a compelling story. Data earns credibility. Stories earn commitment. The best foundation websites do both.
• It performs on every device. Mobile experience, load speed, and accessibility aren’t technical add-ons — they were a part of the site from the beginning.
• It’s easy for internal teams to manage. A website should empower staff to publish stories and update content without needing a developer for every change.
• It’s built to evolve. Launch is a milestone, not a finish line. Great websites grow through analytics, feedback, and ongoing optimization.

Want to know how your nonprofit’s site measures up? Reach out to STella! today.

The Real Measure of This Project’s Success

An AVA Platinum Award is the highest distinction in digital communication — but it is not the metric that matters most to us.

What matters is whether Southlake Health Foundation’s donors land on the site and immediately understand why their support is essential. Whether a first-time visitor feels the weight of 44 years of community impact before they scroll past the fold. Whether the path from interest to action is clear enough that someone who arrived curious leaves as a donor.

That is the standard we build to.

Every nonprofit we work with faces a version of the same challenge: a mission that deserves more than a functional website, and an audience that will give more when the digital experience earns their trust. The Southlake Health Foundation project is proof that when strategy, storytelling, and genuine collaboration come together around a mission that matters, the work reflects it.

If your organization is ready to build a digital experience that does the same — one your donors trust, your team can manage, and your mission can grow into — we’d like to hear about it