Your RFP is direct about the problem. The site is organized around donors, partners, and civic leaders. The people with the most at stake, prospective and current residents, meet the most friction. Correcting that imbalance, in your words "not simply refreshing the existing design," is the work.
In a discovery session with our team in June of 2016, Greta Harris described what Better Housing Coalition is for: helping people reach their fullest potential.
One of us wrote down the line that came after it, that the housing is a byproduct of the work being done. Many years later, it is still the clearest description we have heard of why this organization matters, and it is why we would like to do this work again.
We built the site you are replacing, and we have supported it ever since. We still think it answered the question you were asking then. What has changed is how much more we understand now about where a problem like yours actually sits.
The most useful thing those relationships taught us is that the website is not always the answer.
Some of that came from the work we have done since. A number of our clients, several of them nonprofits, moved to an iterative way of working with us, making significant changes year after year and building on what was already there until the website became a core part of how they market, communicate, and raise money. Two of those relationships are described later in our proposal. That is where we learned the most about this sector, and it is the kind of partnership we would want with you. You have grown a great deal in the same period. So have we.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes the real constraint is how an organization communicates, and no amount of code or design will fix it. Sometimes the answer is a separate platform doing one job well, with the site pointing at it clearly. Most often the right solution is a combination, a platform that solves the underlying problem and a website that explains it in language people understand.
Your brief for that first project was already pointing at the thing we would now do differently. It told us the top two landing pages most months were "Rent a Home" and "Senior Apartments," and that this audience was BHC's largest income generator. It also noted that BHC ran Yardi on the back end, that RentCafe had "never been implemented," and that putting online unit viewing and applications in front of prospective residents "deserves more consideration." We agreed with the read, built mission-first with the resident path second, and the site performed well against the goals as written. What we did not do was put those two together: the audience that mattered most to you, and the tool already sitting there to serve them. We scoped the website as the whole of the work and treated the handoff to Yardi and RentCafe as a smaller question at its edge. That is how website projects were scoped then, ours included. It is not how we would scope this one.
In practice that means deciding where each part of the problem actually lives before designing anything for it. The path described to us in August, where someone checks whether they qualify and is then told to call, is the clearest example in your RFP of a problem a website alone will not fix.
We have changed in other ways too. In 2016 we were “CO+LAB,” working out of a small office in Manchester. We eventually grew into a full office, and today we are a distributed team with people as far away as France and Hawaii (both of them Richmond natives). Our founder and our leadership are from here, which is part of why BHC has never left our field of view. We have watched you appear in headline after headline since, as the region's largest community development corporation, at the State of the City, at the Multifamily Summit, receiving a humanitarian award. You are a fixture in Richmond housing and in the Richmond nonprofit community both, and the people who worked on your site then have followed that the way you follow an organization you once helped.
I can speak for everyone at COLAB when I say we would welcome the chance to evolve this relationship and keep working together. Nonprofit work is the work our team wants more of, because building something that helps an organization support other people is the part of this job people here are proudest of. We would like to bring what we have learned since to helping the people you serve reach their fullest potential.
Sincerely,
Ralph Otto, Chief Product Officer
Better Housing Coalition serves more than 2,800 residents a year across 20 communities, and pairs that housing with services your own site calls free and voluntary. The website should make both as easy to reach as your fundraising is today.
Behind all of it is ten years watching this problem and a decade of work with organizations like yours, which taught us what holds up after launch and what stops working by year three. The commitment underneath is one you will recognize: the people a service exists for should be the people it is designed around.
Your objectives name three tasks: finding available units, understanding eligibility, and learning what life in a BHC community is like. Each is a different kind of problem.
Availability is a data problem, and it goes stale.
Eligibility is a language problem, because the rules are genuinely complicated and the people who need them most are often reading on a phone.
What life is like is a storytelling problem, and the one a website is least likely to solve by accident.
We treat that as the central problem in this response rather than a feature request inside it. Toggle to compare it with the resident path set out in Audience Strategy.
Making it easy for residents only works if staff can keep up with what arrives. A well-designed inquiry nobody answers for four days is worse than a phone number.
Your RFP says property management operates under BHC Management, that "the two brands are not always clearly connected," and that resolving how they relate "rather than treating that relationship as an afterthought" is in scope.
The site has to support fundraising while carrying the credibility of an organization whose leadership is a regional voice on housing. None of that competes with the resident work. A site that demonstrably serves residents well is the most persuasive thing a donor can be shown.
Three options at our nonprofit rate. Each option includes everything in the option before it, so the steps up are additive rather than alternative. Select an option to see what it includes and how it is allocated.
Allocated against COLAB's standard budget components. Hover or focus a category for its published allocation range.
All prices quoted are ranges. Final pricing would be determined after scope confirmation. If the right answer sits between two of these, tell us and we will scope it with you. Invoicing is monthly across the duration of the engagement, beginning at project commencement, with a schedule issued with the Statement of Work.
Hands-on CMS workshops, video tutorial creation, detailed documentation, and post-launch support with technical assistance.
Additional investment for analytics setup and training.
Post-launch support with unlimited technical assistance.
Depending on the level of service and organizational needs.
Hourly Rate. COLAB uses a blended hourly rate of $190/hour for nonprofit organizations and $200/hour for all other entities.
When we initially redesigned the site, a single redesign served two distinct audiences: home seekers and donors.
Organized by what each audience is trying to do, not by who BHC is internally. None of the three should have to understand BHC's organizational chart to get to the right place.
It does not resolve the tension by ranking the audiences. It resolves it by routing them, quickly and without making anyone feel like the site was built for somebody else.
The content model, rather than the page design, is what actually holds the balance over time. Pages drift.
This is an architecture question before it is a branding one. Where property-level content lives decides whether a person crosses a brand boundary in the middle of trying to find a home. Your Scope of Work asks for a recommendation. We will deliver one, produced with you in discovery.
The translation problem here is not that BHC writes badly. Your resident-facing pages already do this well. The difficulty is that the plain writing and the operational writing are not connected to the same tasks.
Each community record would carry both: what life there is like, in the language you already use, and what it takes to live there, in language that is accurate without being procedural.
Explained where they matter, not in a glossary. Each concept surfaces at the point a person meets it, in one or two sentences, with the fuller explanation available for those who want it.
Written as connected but distinct paths for donors and policymakers, and for residents who want to know whether something is being built near them and when.
A home for your leadership's voice in the regional housing conversation, structured so publishing is light enough to actually happen.
Clear ownership per content type, a small number of templates, and guidance written into the CMS at the point of authoring.
Identifying which content to keep, update, or retire, with migration strategies that preserve SEO value.
We treat WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the compliance baseline and WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the target, aligned with ADA and Section 508 requirements.
When we met in August you described effectively one person publishing, at roughly a post a quarter. A workflow with four approval stages would be correct on paper and abandoned within a quarter. Your RFP asks for something "lightweight," and we intend that word to do real work.
Your resident support services team gets a short structured submission form, usable from a phone. Submissions land as drafts in the CMS rather than in somebody's inbox.
BHC owns the policy. We build the mechanism: consent captured at submission, a visible record, and a documented way to unpublish that does not require a developer.
The publisher sees the story, the photos, and the consent status together, edits the text, and publishes. Resident Experience adds role-based approval.
Resident stories are a content type, not a page, so one story can appear on:
Training that assumes turnover. Documentation and recorded walkthroughs rather than a single live session, written so the next person can learn the workflow without the previous person being available.
The work moves through four stages, in short, visible cycles with live demos, so you see progress and help shape it as we go.
Discovery across content and the CMS, user experience, and the technical landscape, ending in a documented vision.
Information architecture, project approach, requirements, and KPIs, resulting in a Product Roadmap.
Design system and custom block-enabled WordPress theme, features, content, and testing, ending in a working platform.
Deploy to the live environment, verify against staging, and confirm with your team.
Nonprofits are COLAB's most established client sector. We've worked with 25+ nonprofit organizations across six subsegments. Most of these relationships started with a small first project and grew into multi-year partnerships the organization depends on.
Why this one is here. Sports Backers is the closest structural analogue in our portfolio to the question in Brand Architecture: a group of related properties and sub-brands that had to hold together as one presence while serving audiences with different reasons to show up.
Read the case study →
Why this one is here. The Richmond Forum serves subscribers, donors, and a general public audience at the same time, which is the co-equal audience problem stated in Question 2. It is also a Richmond nonprofit, and the reference contact for it appears in Appendix D.
Read the case study →Why this one is here. LCLD is the strongest evidence we have that COLAB designs for genuinely co-equal audiences: Members, Fellows, Pathfinders, 1L Scholars, and Mentors, all running on one platform and one data model.
Read the case study →Applied from an early-October kickoff, discovery runs through late fall, foundation development occupies the winter, and content, testing, and launch follow in sequence. The engagement is shorter for Foundation and longer for Full Platform. Select a phase to see what it includes.
Bar lengths sit within the standard phase ranges listed beside each phase and are shown for comparison only.
WordPress is our working assumption, validated in discovery. If discovery points elsewhere, we would say so before design begins.
10% of project budget, only drawn against with your approval.
The BHC and BHCM structure is resolved in discovery before information architecture is finalized, as the RFP directs.
Content strategy and page-level guidance in every option. Copywriting is included in Full Platform for priority pages and available as an addition to the other two.
Web strategy, design, and development all stay in-house at COLAB, and you work with the same people from kickoff through launch. Select anyone to read more.
Since 2008, we have partnered with organizations during moments of meaningful change, building digital solutions that perform, evolve, and earn trust over time.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond. We would welcome the chance to walk through any part of this in person, and to answer whatever the committee wants pressed on.
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