LHA Trails

The Lewisboro Horsemen’s Association (LHA) is a nonprofit that supports local equestrians and maintains bridle trails in Northern Westchester. I led a comprehensive brand and digital refresh to help the organization increase its visibility, reach new audiences, and streamline digital management.

SERVICES

Brand Positioning & Strategy
Brand Voice & Messaging
Brand Identity
AI Strategy
Collateral Design
Email & CRM
SEO
Reporting & Analytics
Website Design & Development
Digital Design System

Challenge

The LHA website was outdated, hard to navigate, and lacked clear calls to action, making it difficult for users to pay for membership or find information about events. Like many small nonprofits, they relied on an aging WordPress site that required external help to manage and was expensive to maintain.

Their social media and email channels weren’t being used consistently, which made it harder to keep the community informed and engaged.

Goal

The goal was to create a website that volunteers could easily update without needing outside help, while still performing well with SEO. The new site needed to be simple to manage, highlight events and ways to get involved, and support a broader digital strategy that included social media, email, and content creation.

Audience Research

To help the LHA better connect with its audience, I analyzed local SEO trends using AI tools like SEMrush, BuzzSumo, and ChatGPT to identify what people were actually searching for around trails, riding experiences, and equestrian groups in Westchester County. I used ChatGPT to generate natural-language search terms, simulate user personas, and explore what different audience types—like beginner riders or trail users—might be looking for. I also studied competitor and partner sites using tools like Similarweb and Screaming Frog to understand their structure, messaging, and SEO strategies. Then I mapped all of this against LHA’s existing site to spot missing content, dead ends, and underused assets.

*Get in touch with me directly me to view my exact prompts and strategy here.

Brand & Strategy

Brand Refresh

The LHA’s branding needed refinement to reflect the warmth, accessibility, and community orientation of the organization. I developed a refreshed visual identity—featuring a cleaner logo, updated typography, and a new color palette—and introduced a tone of voice that is welcoming, grounded, and consistent. These updates aimed to make the brand feel more approachable while maintaining its authority in local trail preservation. I also created brand guidelines to help future volunteers and staff maintain this consistency across all platforms. The insights from the research phase were integrated into AI tools to ensure these elements were consistently applied across the website, email campaigns, and social media posts.

Photo Content & Creative Direction

Visual content plays a pivotal role in engaging audiences and conveying a brand's essence. Recognizing this, I directed and shot new photo content that reflected the community-driven and equestrian spirit of The LHA. This included images of local trails, events, and community members enjoying outdoor activities. The creative direction aimed to evoke a sense of connection and heritage, while also showcasing the welcoming atmosphere of The LHA. These photos not only elevated the website’s visual appeal but were also leveraged across social media and email campaigns, ensuring consistency in both the aesthetic and tone of the organization’s messaging. The photos helped establish an emotional connection with the audience, further strengthening The LHA's online presence.

Website Redesign

The website redesign was a critical piece of the digital marketing strategy. It needed to be functional, aesthetically aligned with the refreshed brand identity, and optimized for SEO. I chose a website builder that would allow easy updates by volunteers, reducing reliance on external support and streamlining future maintenance. Leveraging my experience in UX, I simplified the site’s navigation and structure to ensure visitors could quickly find essential information—whether about events, membership, or trail preservation efforts. I optimized the site for SEO by implementing keyword strategies from my audience research and improving technical SEO elements, such as meta tags, alt text for images, and internal linking. The result was a user-friendly, high-performing website that was easy for the LHA team to manage and optimized for search visibility.

Digital Design System

While Squarespace offers a built-in style guide, I developed a comprehensive digital design system to ensure consistency and clarity across the LHA’s entire online presence.

This system not only guided the website design but also helped me maintain visual cohesion across email campaigns and social media platforms.

Digital Marketing Strategy

With the website redesigned and the brand refreshed, I turned to enhancing The LHA's broader digital marketing efforts. Social media and email were the primary channels for connecting with the community. Using AI tools like ChatGPT for content ideation and BuzzSumo for identifying trending topics and high-performing content, I developed content strategies based on the insights gathered during audience research.

For social media, I created a content calendar that incorporated engaging, community-driven posts about upcoming events, trail preservation efforts, and volunteer opportunities. For email campaigns, I used Mailchimp to automate personalized newsletters and segment audiences based on engagement and behavior patterns.

The Result

Overall, after one year, we achieved the following metrics

  • 3x increase in organic traffic due to improved SEO and clearer content structure

  • 52% increase in average session duration and reduced bounce rate

  • 35% increase in email open rates with click-through rates more than doubling

  • 20% increase in membership

  • Volunteers can now run the site by themselves

Reflections

The project revitalized the LHA’s digital and print presence, transforming a disjointed, hard-to-maintain brand into a cohesive, accessible, and self-sustaining platform.

Thanks to the new website, optimized content, and unified branding, the organization is now more discoverable online and better equipped to grow its membership. The board can easily update content and promote events across channels, while local riders have a welcoming digital destination to learn about trails, sign up for events, and support the preservation of open space in Northern Westchester.

This project reshaped my understanding of how digital strategy can empower grassroots organizations. It wasn’t just about improving SEO or visuals—it was about making the LHA feel accessible to newcomers, more connected to partner organizations, and more confident in its own voice online. I realized that modernizing a nonprofit’s digital presence is, at its heart, about inviting people in.

The experience also deepened my appreciation for the role AI can play in thoughtful, human-centered marketing. Learning to prompt effectively showed me how to get the most out of these tools—translating strategic goals into targeted outputs that saved time and sparked new ideas. It reinforced that with the right approach, AI can amplify both creativity and clarity in the work.

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