Hubspot Nonprofit Starter Theme by Mosaic

A modern designed HubSpot Theme built for Nonprofits. This theme allows your mission to shine by increasing your supporters by visually engaging them with your story.

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Mosaic's Nonproft Starter Theme - The Story Of Our Journey

Our inspiration to create a nonprofit starter theme

At Mosaic, a large majority of our clients are nonprofit organizations. We enjoy working with these organizations as they align with our values to lift every voice and to help everyone find the best path.

HubSpot is an amazing platform but we find that most of the assets in the marketplace are geared towards services or sales-oriented businesses. The marketplace lacks website page layouts that are conducive to the nonprofit world and the user experience of their audiences. One of our goals is to leverage our experience from the nonprofit landscape to add to a platform that is mostly devoid of themes targeted towards this market and the goals they are striving to achieve.

This inspired our team to create a nonprofit starter theme that is visually appealing, has layouts that are available in sections and modules that are easy to use. This theme now allows organizations to bring their voice to a platform that is powerful enough to help them take their brand, tech stack, and audience reach to the next level.


What our theme does

Mosaic's Nonprofit Starter Theme allows any nonprofit to feel like they have the tools needed to create a powerful and professional online presence. And guess what? No prior web design or development experience needed! It provides a bundle of useful modules, sections, and templates that will allow nonprofit organizations who want to get up and running the opportunity to quickly reach their targeted audience. Packed with inspiration, the content included with the theme can be used as a guide to fully express an organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals.


How we built our theme

Our team started the design process with digital wireframes to help sort content, then translated those wireframes into a beautiful, complete design using Adobe XD. Designs are reviewed together by our project team to assess functionality to ensure that the design will translate to a well developed website theme. Design assets are then passed onto our development team who meticulously crafted code to bring the site to life.

We built this theme with utmost flexibility using HubSpot’s drag-and-drop paradigm for building modules, sections and templates while also providing theme settings allowing the user to take control of their theme’s colors and typography.


Challenges we ran into

All CMS platforms have their differences. A major difference with HubSpot’s CMS is that it uses a unique language called HubL for the platform. This works in conjunction with other languages such as javascript, HTML, and CSS to create a website. Many of the modules and sections found within our theme took numerous revisions. Developing a product that is to be used by non-programmers forces you to look at your work from a non-developer point of view. It took trial and error to determine what process we should follow in order to make our modules, sections, and templates extremely easy to work with and customizable for non-technical users.

There are very strict guidelines for developers to ensure that your theme’s code will pass the initial verification process to appear in the Asset Marketplace. However, this is a good model as it ensures that the end user will have a quality product and experience when working with their selected theme. Our team had continuous meetings to review code base for UI and UX so that we could ensure that our work would pass HubSpot’s code verification standards.


Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are proud to have created a strong, attractive, and clean design for this project. Bringing the design to life into something tangible was a big accomplishment for our team. Knowing that our product adheres to the guidelines for developing a theme to be listed in the HubSpot Asset Marketplace is an achievement and an honor. This project allowed us to strengthen our ability to work as a team and under pressure to hit a submission deadline. We feel that Mosaic’s Nonprofit Starter Theme fully expresses our creative skills and abilities and can’t wait to continue building off this foundation for the next iteration.


What we learned

The HubSpot platfrom and the requirements for the products that are listed in the marketplace have changed over the years. Their CMS platform has become very strong and is moving to be a major player in the marketplace. Our team had to adopt new skills for adhering to the shift from the use of “templates” to “themes” and how they are built. Although we build custom themes for other client projects on this platform this was the first time we have developed a product to be listing in the HubSpot Marketplace. We learned the process of what it takes to list an asset, whether theme, module, etc.


What's next for Hubspot Nonprofit Starter Theme by Mosaic

HubSpot is not your traditional resource for nonprofit organizations for digital marketing but the power behind HubSpot CMS, Marketing, CRM, and other subscriptions has many advantages for these organizations to add more powerful tools to their tech stack. With our experience in working with clients in this sector we look forward to expanding upon our starter theme. We plan to add more features, modules, sections, and page templates that meet the needs of what we feel can really help nonprofit organzations.

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