Marathon Shriners
A century-old Florida Keys Shrine club that drives sick kids to specialty children's hospitals — free to families, always. We built the site that turns a QR code on a car window into a tax-deductible donation in under 60 seconds.
The Challenge
The Marathon Shrine Club — a chapter of the Mahi Shriners chartered in 1922 — runs one simple, serious operation: drive Keys kids who need orthopedic, burn, spinal, or cleft care to specialty children’s hospitals, at no cost to the family, ever. The hard part isn’t the mission; it’s the ask. Most of their giving happens at roadside paper drives and community events, where a donor wants to help but no longer carries cash. The club needed to capture that 30-second “I’d give if I could” moment — usually a phone held out a car window — and turn it into a real donation before the light turned green.
The Build
We built a mobile-first site on Astro and Netlify designed around a single repeated CTA: give. Donations run through Zeffy, the only truly zero-fee nonprofit platform, so 100% of every gift reaches the kids — one-tap from any page, with the form lazy-loaded so it never slows the first paint. QR codes (generated at build time) point straight at the donation flow for paper-drive signs and car windows. Trust does the selling: 1922 charter, 22 hospitals, 1.3 million kids helped, $0 ever billed to a family — the numbers earn the right to ask before the copy ever does. The design leans into who the Shriners actually are — vintage Florida postcard meets 1950s carnival poster meets old fraternal-order letterhead, gold and crimson and fez crest — warm and joyful, never clinical or stiff. We also baked in IRS fair-market-value disclosure on event-based giving so the club stays compliant and penalty-free.
The Result
A nonprofit site that feels like the club itself — fun, proud, and a century deep — while doing one job relentlessly well: converting intent into a tax-deductible gift in under a minute, on a phone, in full sun, with every dollar landing on the mission. No fees skimmed, no families billed, no cash required.