EOFT October visibility — web / funnel / SEO punch list

TL;DR — the insight before the recap

Four things matter more than building anything new: 1. The film viewer is not primarily a donor — they're an email convert. A 15‑minute fest film realistically yields $3–8K in direct donations from a Q4 push, not the windfall the brief implies. The actual prize is email list growth + brand prospect inbound + scholar candidates in that order. Design for those three, not for "donate now." 2. The festival audience will rarely land on a page you control. They'll Google "Summit Scholarship" or "LOWA Cervino" or "Matterhorn women's film" and land on the homepage, on a LOWA page, on YouTube, or on news coverage. The biggest lever is what the film itself sends them to — an end‑credit URL/QR coordinated with the producer — followed by Google Knowledge Panel + OG image cleanup. The dedicated /film landing is table stakes, not the prize. 3. The "donations flow up to GEA" plan is half‑baked technically. Today, every donation routes through Summit Scholarship's Donorbox campaign 239 — branded "Summit Scholarship Foundation," with schema.org/Organization still listing that as legalName. Re‑routing donations to a GEA‑branded surface in October is a platform change in the worst possible window. The brief also assumes Classy and Kit — neither is live. Trying to do an EOFT push and a payments/ESP migration in the same window is the single most likely way to blow this moment. 4. The biggest gift this deep dive can give you is the STOP‑doing list. Pick a surface‑freeze date (Aug 15), ship the moment, then don't touch anything else until December. The dilution risk is real. Numbers I'd hold the org to (justified below): | Metric | Floor | Target | "Worked" | |---|---|---|---| | Unique sessions on /film (Oct 1 – Dec 31) | 1,200 | 2,000 | 4,000+ | | Email signups attributable to film traffic (UTM‑tagged) | 150 | 300 | 600+ | | Donations attributable | 20 | 40 | 80+ | | Attributable donation $ | $1,800 | $4,000 | $10,000+ | | Warm sponsor inbounds citing film | 1 | 2 | 4+ | | Scholar candidates citing film in application | 3 | 6 | 12+ | The "worked" column is what justifies replicating this play. If we land in the floor column, the funnel was leaky; the diagnosis is which step.

§1Audit — what's actually live today (cite, don't summarize)

Done by walking the live Summit Scholarship sitemap (83 URLs), GEA Alliance preview, and Cairn Project on 2026‑06‑19.

Summit Scholarship (Squarespace)

• Domain: www.summitscholarship.org (301 from apex). Squarespace‑hosted.
• Nav: About, Initiatives, Leadership, Partners, Make a Donation, Newsletter, GEA Alliance, Women of Mountaineering Calendar, Blog.
• Existing scholarship‑climb landing pages (12): including /lowa-matterhorn-summit-scholarship-2026, /glacier-peak-summit-scholarship-2026, /mawa-chamonix-summit-scholarship-2026, etc.
• Existing /lowa-matterhorn-summit-scholarship-2026:
• <title>: "2026 LOWA Matterhorn Summit Scholarship — The Summit Scholarship Foundation"
• og:image: the transparent foundation logo at 1500×1500 — catastrophic for social shares. A film page sharing as a white logo will be ignored.
• Zero mention of the film, no trailer, no end‑of‑expedition photos at time of writing.
• /make-a-donation: embeds Donorbox widget for campaign website-donations-239. Not Classy. Not Stripe direct. Not a GEA‑branded campaign.
• /newsletter: posts to MailerLite (assets.mailerlite.com form ID 174090680303355802, account 1233975). Not Kit/ConvertKit.
• /gea-alliance bridge page: exists, single H2 "Read the official GEA Alliance press release." Thin, basically a press‑release index.
• /the-summit-scholarship apply page: clear sections (#ClimbForEquality, 2026 Program Timeline, FAQs link, selection process link). Application surface is functional.
• /partners: clear tier hierarchy — Premium Sponsor → Other Summit Supporters → Gear Sponsors → Operating Partners. LOWA, Fjällräven, Deuter all listed.
• /women-of-mountaineering-calendar: product page; 2026 calendar SKU in store.
• Schema.org: Organization legalName = "Summit Scholarship Foundation"; address = "300 E 300 N Unit I‑3, Kanab"; LocalBusiness type set. This still references the pre‑merger entity.
• Missing entirely: /film, /press, /media, /eoft, /cervino, /matterhorn-film, any press kit, any video on the existing Matterhorn page, hreflang tags, German content.

GEA Alliance preview (gea-alliance.pages.dev)

• Static Python‑generated, 204 lines of HTML.
• Sections: Hero / Mission / Genesis / Initiatives / How / Leadership / Partners / CTA ("Get in touch").
• No donation surface, no email capture, no DNS on gea-alliance.org (deploys to pages.dev only; manual‑dispatch gated). Email listed: sunny@gea-alliance.org (the README placeholder says hello@geaalliance.org).
• Brand LOCKED (Archivo + Source Sans 3, graphite/petrol/limestone).
• Not yet a donate destination, and shouldn't become one inside this window.

Cairn Project (WordPress on Flywheel)

• cairnproject.org, separate stack, separate donation surface, separate ESP.
• For EOFT purposes: out of scope. Festival traffic is Summit‑intent, not Cairn‑intent.

The thing the brief got wrong, that you should know

• The brief listed "FoundingEngineer (Classy donation flow, Kit signup)" as a dependency. Neither is live. If those migrations are planned, they need to be either done by July 15 or deferred to Q1 2027. There's no middle path that survives EOFT.

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§2Funnel design

The diagram

                       ┌───────────────────────────────────────────┐
                       │  Pre‑film: Google search,                 │
                       │  EOFT website/program, press,             │
                       │  LOWA Cervino marketing                   │
                       └────────────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                                            │
                                            ▼
              ╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
              ║      FESTIVAL SCREEN / IN‑FILM END SLATE              ║
              ║      "summitscholarship.org/film" + QR code           ║
              ║      ← OWNED BY THE FILM PRODUCER, NOT THE SITE        ║
              ╚════════════════════════┬══════════════════════════════╝
                                       │
                                       ▼
            ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
            │  /film  — canonical EOFT landing (EN; DE language block) │
            │  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────  │
            │  HERO:  film trailer (90s) + 1‑sentence why              │
            │  BAND:  3 segment CTAs                                   │
            │  BELOW: behind‑the‑film, scholar story, partner credit  │
            │  FOOT:  "Made possible by GEA Alliance" + press contact │
            └──┬──────────────────┬───────────────────┬────────────┬──┘
               │                  │                   │            │
               ▼                  ▼                   ▼            ▼
        ┌────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐  ┌──────────┐
        │  DONATE    │    │  SUBSCRIBE   │    │   APPLY     │  │ PARTNER  │
        │  (donor)   │    │  (curious)   │    │  (scholar)  │  │  (brand) │
        └─────┬──────┘    └──────┬───────┘    └──────┬──────┘  └─────┬────┘
              │                  │                   │              │
              ▼                  ▼                   ▼              ▼
       /make-a-donation    /newsletter         /the-summit-     /partner-pitch
       Donorbox 239        MailerLite          scholarship      (already live)
       receipt cites       "Post‑Cervino"      → application    + email Sunny
       GEA EIN             welcome drip 3x     → selection      direct
                                                process FAQ
                                                     │
                                                     ▼
                                              Calendar reveal
                                              winter (separate
                                              funnel, don't mix)

Why this shape (segment‑by‑segment)

The CTA that wins by segment, derived from likely intent at the moment the page loads:

The single‑CTA fallacy: every landing‑page playbook says "one primary CTA." For a fest film landing that's wrong — film audiences arrive with very different intents (cf. above table). The page must offer 3 visible CTAs in a band, not bury two behind nav. The visual hierarchy gives equal weight to Donate / Subscribe / Apply with Partner + Press as smaller follow‑ons in the footer.

Why donate is not the primary CTA: Average industry donor‑conversion on a cold festival‑visitor landing is 0.5–2%. Average email‑capture on a free‑content offer with a soft ask is 10–20%. Optimizing for the larger, longer‑term funnel wins.

The Cairn / GEA bridge

The brief asked for festival donations to "flow up to GEA." Two architectural options, with a clear recommendation:

• Option A (RECOMMENDED for October): Keep Donorbox campaign 239 live. Update receipt copy + Schema.org to read "Summit Scholarship, a program of GEA Alliance · 501(c)(3) EIN 87‑2236254." Add a footer band on /film and /make-a-donation reading "Made possible by GEA Alliance." All money still routes through the existing rail. Governance/tax flow already lives at GEA; the donor‑facing brand stays "Summit" because that's what they Googled and that's what the film is about. Cost: 1 day of FoundingEngineer + Webmaster work.
• Option B (DEFER to Q1 2027): Stand up a GEA Alliance Donorbox/Classy campaign with its own receipt copy and branding, route the /film CTA there, treat Summit's existing Donorbox as legacy. Cost: 2–3 weeks of FE work + brand testing + risk of broken redirect at peak traffic. Not worth doing in October.

The Cairn Project side is a non‑issue for EOFT — festival traffic is Summit‑intent. Don't try to drive /film viewers to Cairn; you'll dilute both stories.

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§3SEO, structured data, multilingual

What actually moves the needle by October

The honest answer: very little. SEO compounds over 6–12 months. We have 4 months and the moment lasts ~8 weeks. The SEO work that does matter:

What I am explicitly NOT doing

• Full site German translation. Squarespace i18n is brittle for a non‑localized org with one part‑time content writer. Cost is weeks; payoff is marginal because most German viewers read English. One bilingual long‑form post >> 80 mediocre auto‑translated pages.
• A long‑tail keyword push. Won't compound in 4 months.
• Schema overhaul site‑wide. Touch only /film, the Matterhorn scholarship page, and the homepage Organization block.

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§4Performance + mobile

EU mobile audiences will hit the site over slow networks (4G, intermittent). Squarespace's baseline LCP is mediocre for image‑heavy templates. Targets and actions:

Mobile‑first concrete asks: - All /film images served via Squarespace's ?format=750w for ≤ 750px viewports — Squarespace does this if image blocks are used; verify on a real device, not Lighthouse. - The donate button at the bottom of /film should be a sticky bar on mobile (Squarespace can do this with a header announcement bar repurposed, OR a simple JS injection in code block). - No autoplay video, ever. Both performance and accessibility.

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§5Press kit / journalist landing

Build this in two phases — it's downstream of assets, not the other way around.

Phase 1 (Sep 1): assets ready, no page yet

Rachel curates a private Google Drive folder containing: - 8–12 high‑res Matterhorn shoot photos with embedded caption + photographer credit - Film synopsis: 1 paragraph + 1 page - Film trailer: 30s + 90s cuts with English + German subtitle files - Bios: scholar (1 page), Sunny (1 page), LOWA (1 paragraph) - Logos: GEA Alliance + Summit Scholarship + LOWA in .svg + transparent .png at 4 sizes - Fact sheet: scholarship history, 2,150 / 14 demand stat, alumnae list, EIN, 501(c)(3) status

Phase 2 (Sep 15): /press landing

Single‑page surface with: - Above the fold: one‑line "What this is" + film trailer + "Request screener / interview" mailto - "Download press kit" button → links the Drive folder (publicly readable, view‑only) - Boilerplate org block (250 words on GEA Alliance + Summit Scholarship) - Press contact: Sunny direct email + phone - Logo lockup downloads - Recent coverage logs (filled in as it accumulates Oct–Dec)

Why a Drive folder and not on‑site downloadables: journalists expect to download a zip. Squarespace makes that painful. A clean Drive folder is the lowest‑friction handoff. Keep the landing page on the site so it's brand‑coherent, but the assets live where journalists can pull them.

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§6Analytics + measurement

To attribute lift, instrument before the moment. Setup must be live by Sep 15.

What to instrument

• GA4 (whatever's currently on Summit — verify Sep 1).
• MailerLite source tagging: every signup form on /film gets a hidden source=film field. Welcome drip tagged cohort=cervino2026.
• Donorbox campaign tracking: create a second Donorbox campaign or use the existing ?utm pass‑through. Donorbox surfaces UTM in the donation export. Recommend: keep campaign 239, rely on UTM.
• Goal events in GA4:
• film_trailer_play (when video play fires)
• donate_click (when /film donate button is clicked, before the redirect)
• apply_click
• email_submit (MailerLite form success)
• press_kit_download
• UTM convention (publish this as /film/utm.md or in the partner portal):
• utm_source = eoft | secondaryfest | press_outlet_name | lowa | fjallraven | partner_email | social_ig | social_fb | yt
• utm_medium = film_credit | program | article | newsletter | post | story | reel
• utm_campaign = cervino2026
• utm_content = freeform per placement
• Press log spreadsheet: every press placement Sunny or Rachel hears about gets logged with date, outlet, language, link, estimated reach. Manual; non‑negotiable.

Reporting cadence

Weekly Monday digest in the partner portal Oct 6 – Jan 4: sessions, top sources, signups, donations, press log delta. Webmaster owns the weekly script.

What success looks like in numbers — the math behind §TL;DR

Underlying assumptions: - EOFT 2026 tour: ~50 European stops × ~600 in‑room viewers = ~30K live viewers (Oct‑Dec). - Plus secondary fest circuit (~10K) + EOFT online channels + organic share (~50K). - Total film reach assumption: ~90K. - Film‑to‑URL click‑through (industry baseline for outdoor doc with strong end slate): 1.5–3%. Floor 1%, target 2%, "worked" 4%. - Of those who click, sessions reach /film directly: 80%. - → Sessions floor 1,200, target 2,000, "worked" 4,000. - Email capture rate on /film (well‑built landing, soft ask): 12–18%. → 150 / 300 / 600. - Donation conversion on /film (cold visitor → first‑time gift): 1–3%. → 20 / 40 / 80. - Avg gift (Donorbox first‑time, this domain): $80. → $1.6K / $3.2K / $6.4K immediate. - Email‑drip uplift (those who give later via the welcome drip): +30%. → $2K / $4K / $10K total in‑window. - Sponsor inbounds: 1–4 warm conversations. Closing 1 = +$5–15K next year — not booked Oct‑Dec.

The honest read: even a "worked" outcome is $10K of immediate cash and ~600 new emails. The cash isn't the prize. The pipeline is.

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§7The donation thermometer question

Recommendation: no thermometer on /film. Reasoning:

Thermometers work when there's: - A clear, finite goal ($X by Y date) - Donor relationship continuity (they came back to check the progress) - A capital‑campaign narrative (one big thing being funded)

The film moment has none of those. Visitors are cold first‑timers; the "goal" is fuzzy (scholarships next year); and the visit is one‑and‑done.

Better alternative: a "Fund a scholar" tile grid.

┌────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬────────────┐
│   $50      │   $250     │   $1,000   │   $5,000   │
│ one day of │   gear     │  training  │ expedition │
│  training  │ allotment  │   block    │    seat    │
│            │            │            │            │
│  [Give 50] │ [Give 250] │ [Give 1K]  │ [Give 5K]  │
└────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴────────────┘

Concrete, scannable, segments self‑select, no historical context needed. Donorbox supports preset amounts natively.

Where a thermometer DOES make sense: the year‑end giving page on GEA Alliance proper (or Summit's homepage Nov–Dec), with a $X goal tied to a specific outcome ("fund 6 scholars for 2027"). The lever is the lever #7 in the 2027 plan — the "year‑end giving campaign" that's still unbuilt. EOFT becomes the warmup for that, not the destination.

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§8Punch list

Effort columns: - S = ½ day or less - M = 1–3 days - L = 4+ days (multi‑week if owner is Sunny pre‑Aug)

Total P0 effort: ~12–15 person‑days across the team. The crunch lands Aug 15 – Sep 30, which maps to the Sunny "10 focused biz days then largely off until Aug" constraint cleanly IF Sunny does items 8, 9, and 17 first.

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§9STOP‑doing list

This is the original‑thinking section the brief asked for. Concrete things to NOT ship between now and Nov 30 so the moment isn't diluted:

1. STOP shipping non‑film changes to /the-summit-scholarship after Aug 15. Surface freeze. A site mid‑redesign during peak traffic is the worst case.
2. STOP planning Donorbox → Classy migration in this window. Defer to Q1 2027.
3. STOP planning MailerLite → Kit migration in this window. Same reason.
4. STOP shipping calendar product updates above the fold after Sep 15. Calendar is a separate funnel — don't compete with the film for hero attention. (The calendar promo lives in its own slot lower on the page; that's fine.)
5. STOP routing Trailblazers / Grit Lit / See Her Outside content above the fold on the Summit homepage Sep–Nov. Those audiences aren't the EOFT audience; they shouldn't share hero real estate.
6. STOP creating new scholarship landing pages between now and Nov 30. We already have 12. Focus the moment on Matterhorn.
7. STOP changing brand tokens on GEA Alliance. LOCKED — don't tempt fate.
8. STOP scoping a German full‑site translation. Squarespace i18n will eat weeks for marginal payoff. ONE bilingual post is the better play.
9. STOP putting a donation thermometer on /film. Wrong CTA shape for cold first‑time visitors. (Year‑end campaign on Summit's homepage is the right place.)
10. STOP relying on the homepage as the festival landing. Viewers won't drill; they'll bounce. The canonical URL is /film, full stop.
11. STOP the first public deploy of gea-alliance.org between Sep 1 and Dec 1. Even if the board approves, deploying a brand‑new public face during peak traffic on the bridge brand is asking for confusion. Either deploy now (June‑July) so it's bedded in, or wait until January.
12. STOP routing /film viewers to Cairn. Festival traffic is Summit‑intent; sending them to Cairn dilutes both stories and tanks conversion.

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§10Dependencies — what I need from whom

From FoundingEngineer

• Decision (by Jul 15): Is a Donorbox→Classy migration happening before October? Recommend: NO; defer to Q1 2027.
• Receipt copy update: Donorbox receipt template references GEA Alliance + EIN 87‑2236254 (Item #6 above).
• MailerLite "Post‑Cervino" segment + 3‑email drip template scaffolded for content fill‑in (Item #18).
• Optional: confirm whether GEA Alliance should have its own donation surface stood up now (small, parallel to Summit) so the bridge bar from /film can route the institutional/major‑donor lane there. Recommend NO inside this window.
• DNS / Cloudflare: if/when board approves the GEA Alliance public domain push, FE owns DNS for gea-alliance.org (currently the email address points at a domain we don't yet serve from).

From CEO (Sunny)

• Aug‑window writing (Sunny's pre‑off‑grid days):
• Final copy for /film (~600 words)
• EN + DE long‑form blog post (~1,500 words EN; arrange DE translation)
• Director's statement / press one‑pager (250 words)
• Coordination calls (1–2 hr total):
• Film producer: end‑credit URL, QR code, screening list
• LOWA marketing: cross‑promotion timing on Cervino boot launch
• EOFT: confirm what the program/site will list as the org URL
• Outdoor Retailer Aug 19–21: Angie's there; ensure she has the print press kit
• Google Business Profile claim (Item #17)
• Approval: sign off on the EOFT punch list as a frozen scope by Aug 1

From Rachel Ross (Summit content strategist, off‑books)

• By Aug 31:
• 12 high‑res Matterhorn photos with captions
• Film trailer 30s + 90s cuts with EN/DE subtitle files
• Scholar + Sunny + LOWA bios
• 5 vertical reels + 10 square posts for IG/TikTok
• By Sep 15:
• Press kit Drive folder populated
• YouTube channel branding update
• Ongoing Oct–Dec:
• Press log maintenance (every mention)
• Weekly digest contribution

Cross‑cut blockers

• Rachel's contract is currently off the books (Sunny pays personally). If the EOFT push is the org's flagship Q4 effort, this is the right moment to move her onto the P&L — otherwise the press log + trailer cuts + asset pack are all "favor work" during the highest‑stakes window. Worth a board conversation.

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§11Blind spots and risks the brief didn't surface

In service of the "blind spots and new perspectives" quality bar:

1. The film could go viral or fail to land — we have no plan for either. If it gets picked up by a major outlet (Outside, NYT travel, Bergsteiger), traffic could be 5–10× the floor. If it screens at 6 cities and disappears, the funnel sits cold. Have a "viral playbook" (canned thank‑you reply, journalist follow‑up template, donation matching announcement) AND a "quiet quarter" playbook (re‑purpose into Dec year‑end push).
2. LOWA's own marketing of the Cervino boot will compete or amplify. No one's mapped LOWA's Q4 marketing calendar against ours. If LOWA pushes the boot the same week the film tours, Cervino Google searches spike and they convert to LOWA, not to us. Ask LOWA to sequence the moments and to add Summit's link to their Cervino marketing page. They already have lowaboots.com/pages/summit-scholarship-foundation — that page should be refreshed with the film trailer + a "donate" link in October.
3. The 2,150 / 14 demand stat is the single best journalist hook we have, and it isn't on /the-summit-scholarship today. Every press deflection comes back to "what's the story?" — that's the story. Surface it on /film, in the press kit, on the blog post.
4. We have no plan for what the scholar herself does in October. Is she touring with the film? On the Q&A circuit? Doing press? That's a separate workstream (program/PR), not web, but if she's invisible we miss the "human at the center of the moment" angle.
5. Year‑end giving on Dec 31 always converts better than Q1 giving. The fest moment ending in November sets up Giving Tuesday (Dec 2) + the Dec 28–31 push perfectly — but ONLY IF the email list grew Oct–Nov. The drip + year‑end campaign are a single integrated play, not two separate things. Item #21 + #18 should be designed together.
6. The GEA Alliance public site doesn't have a real /donate surface and shouldn't get one in this window. If a journalist or major donor does find gea-alliance.pages.dev, the conversion path is "Get in touch." That's fine for partnership inbound; it's awful for retail donors. Either route GEA traffic back to Summit's Donorbox via a thin "Support our programs" page, or accept zero retail conversion on GEA in October. Recommend the former; ~2 hours of work.
7. Squarespace's CDN occasionally drops EU traffic. Worth a synthetic mobile test from a German IP in late September. Cheap insurance.
8. No one's thinking about caption files for the trailer. Most fest viewers in Germany won't watch unsubtitled English video on social, and English‑only IG reels of the trailer will underperform vs. captioned. Treat captions/subtitles as a content task, not a video task.

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§12What to do this week (concrete next actions before Sunny goes off‑grid)

That's the entire critical path. Everything after Aug 15 is execution against this list — and if the team doesn't have content in hand by Aug 31, slip Sep 15 launch dates to Sep 22 and trim from the P1 column, not the P0 column.

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Sources: live site audits on 2026‑06‑19 (Summit Scholarship sitemap, /lowa-matterhorn-summit-scholarship-2026, /make-a-donation, /newsletter, /gea-alliance, /partners); GEA Alliance preview at gea-alliance.pages.dev; board‑brief chapters 01b‑2025‑wins, 08‑partner‑momentum, 10‑2027‑levers; retreat ED update commits in gea-board-brief repo on 2026‑06‑19/20. Donorbox campaign id website-donations-239. MailerLite form id 174090680303355802, account 1233975. EIN 87‑2236254.