A new website for
SME Sioux Falls

A proposal from Tellwell Story Co.

Prepared for Kacey McCarthy, Executive Director

November 2026

Hi, SME! We're Tellwell!

Kacey,

When Sami told me about your RFP, she said SME was ready for a website that matches the room. After digging through your calendar, your member directory, and a few hundred event pages, I see what she meant. SME is busy, generous, and full of people who show up for each other. The website should make it just as easy for the next business leader to show up too. That’s what this proposal is about. We’d make joining feel as simple as registering for Coffee Connect, help every event fill its seats, and hand your team a site they can run without calling us for every update. We’d love to build it with you.

Max Kringen
Founder and CEO, Tellwell Story Co.

The short version

SME is busy. There have been around 160 events on your calendar since 2023. SME runs 9 membership meetings and 2 large-scale events each year. Your directory lists around 240 members. This year's Leadership Summit page carries around 30 sponsor logos. People clearly want to be in the room.

Joining is harder. A prospect fills out a long form, waits for the board's monthly meeting, gets an invoice by email, and then mails a check or calls the office. For a busy business leader, that's a lot of steps between deciding to join and actually being a member.

Our plan centers on two paths. We'll make joining SME as easy as signing up for Coffee Connect. We'll also make every event easy to find, understand, and register for on a phone. The rest of the site supports those two paths.

Why Tellwell

  • We've built online giving and event calendars that work for nonprofits. The MSUM Foundation's site is one example.
  • We run a conference ourselves. WellTold has the same jobs as your Leadership Summit: sell tickets, introduce speakers, and give sponsors a reason to say yes.
  • We build sites that a small staff can run. BAND, the Broadband Association of North Dakota, is a member association like yours, with one person handling its communications.

The project is $30,000. It covers strategy, design, build, copywriting, and launch. We'd start in January and launch in June.

What we heard and what we see

Events are the product. Monthly membership meetings, Coffee Connect, Women and Wine, SME 101, Golf JAM, Women in Business, and the Leadership Summit all live on your calendar. Something happens most weeks. The website's biggest job is filling those rooms.

Joining is the hardest step on the site. Your first goal is to grow membership. Today the application asks for a home address and a referral, and payment happens by check or phone after the board approves the application. Keeping the board review makes sense, because it's part of what makes membership mean something. The payment step and the wait are where good prospects drift away.

Sponsors are a real part of your revenue. They deserve a clear page that answers their questions and makes it easy to raise a hand.

Your history and your current site

Your history is an asset. Women in Business keynotes go back to 2013. Your Excellence Award winners go back further. Right now that history is spread across scattered pages, when it could be one place that shows a prospect what SME has meant to Sioux Falls.

A few spots show the site's age. SME News was last updated in 2022. Some photo galleries are from 2017. A page called "2026 test" is publicly visible. All of that is normal for a site that has carried this much for this long, and all of it is easy to fix.

What we'd keep. Connect. Grow. Lead. Your brand equity. WordPress, because your team already knows it.

Our approach

We run every project in three phases: Start, Create, and Activate.

Start

We listen first. We'll visit Sioux Falls for a working session with you and a few board and committee members. We'll call five members to hear why they joined and why they stay. We'll look at your analytics, audit roughly 85 pages of content, and map the join path and event registration path step by step. You'll get a recommended site map before any design begins.

Create

Jen designs and Riley builds. Kari writes the pages that do the most work. We test accessibility as we go instead of saving it for the end.

Activate

We move your content over, set up redirects so search traffic follows you, train your team, and launch. We stay close for 30 days after launch.

How the site is organized

We organize sites around our trust framework, which follows how people come to trust an organization:

  • Introduce. A prospect learns what SME is and who's in the room.
  • Educate. They see the programs and what membership gives them.
  • Engage. They come to an event, the Summit, or Women in Business.
  • Remind. Members see recaps, renew, and remember why they stay.

Your draft navigation already fits this framework well, so we'd keep it close:

We'd add one change: Sponsor SME should get its own clear button in the header, because sponsorship is revenue and sponsors shouldn't have to dig for it.

The join path

  1. A prospect reads Why Join, written for their role.
  1. They fill out a shorter application. In Discovery we'll ask whether the home address and referral need to stay required.
  1. They pay online when they apply.
  1. The board reviews applications the same way it does today. If the board declines someone, SME refunds them.
  1. New members get a welcome email and an invitation to their next event.


The event path

Visitors can filter events by type. Each event page shows the speaker, the time, the location, and member and non-member pricing in one place. We'll design registration and payment to take about a minute on a phone.

SME sells event tickets through Eventbrite today. We recommend moving to Ticket Tailor. Eventbrite's service fee is 3.7% plus $1.79 on every paid ticket, so a $100 Leadership Summit ticket carries $5.49 in Eventbrite fees before payment processing. Ticket Tailor charges one low flat fee per ticket with no percentage. Money goes straight to SME's Stripe, PayPal, or Square account, checkout sits on SME's own website, and the attendee list belongs to SME. We sell WellTold tickets on Ticket Tailor, so we know it well.

After an event, its page becomes a recap with photos, so the archive keeps working for you. We run this same cycle for WellTold every spring: announce, sell, host, recap.

Content

Kari writes about eight core pages: Home, Why Join, Membership, Events, the Programs landing page, Sponsorship, and About. For the remaining pages, we audit each one and mark it to keep, rewrite, combine, remove, or add. We migrate the keepers with light editing. The Women in Business and Excellence Award archives become one history section.

How it will look and feel

You asked for a site that feels modern, professional, energetic, and human, and for one that doesn't feel like a traditional trade association. Here's how we'd get there:

  • People first. The home page and event pages lead with real Sioux Falls leaders at SME events. Stock photos don't make the cut.
  • Fewer words, bigger type. Short sections, strong headlines, and plenty of space, so a busy reader gets the point in a scroll.
  • Your brand, with more energy. Your logo, colors, and Connect. Grow. Lead. stay. We build a fresh set of page templates around them, with color and motion used where they help the eye find the next step.
  • Built from your content. Jen designs each template around SME's own pages and audiences, then Riley builds it. You'll see wireframes before any visual design and visual design before any build.

Research, sized to the budget

You asked about audience research, competitive analysis, and user testing. At this budget we'll do lighter versions of each, and we'd rather tell you that up front:

  • Five member interviews by phone
  • A review of three peer organizations
  • One round of quick testing on the join path with your staff and a few members

That's enough to make good decisions without spending your budget on reports.

SEO

We'll protect the search traffic you already have. Before launch, we map every old URL to its new home with a 301 redirect, carry over page titles and descriptions, submit a fresh XML sitemap, and connect Google Search Console and GA4.

The main migration risks for SME are the roughly 160 event pages, the roughly 240 directory listings, and older pages with inbound links. If their URLs change without redirects, search traffic drops. Our redirect map prevents that. We'll also remove the indexed test page and add structured data for events, so search engines can show your dates and locations directly in results.

Accessibility

We'll build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the current standard. We check color contrast and keyboard navigation during design, not after. We test with automated tools and then by hand, including keyboard-only passes and screen readers. At launch you get a written conformance report.

After launch, we train your staff on accessible content habits, like alt text and heading order. We also build the site so the accessible choice is the easy one when they add new content.

Mobile and performance

We design for phones first, since that's where most people register for an event or decide to join. We'll keep pages light: compressed images, video embedded from YouTube instead of uploaded to your server, caching, and a clean theme. We'll measure Core Web Vitals before launch.

Analytics

GA4 goes in at launch with conversion tracking for:

  • Membership applications
  • Event registrations
  • Sponsor inquiries
  • Contact forms
  • Clicks on key buttons

You'll be able to see what's working and what isn't. Quarterly reporting is included in the higher hosting and care tier.

Integrations

Hosting, security, and support

We host and care for more than 90 WordPress sites. You can choose one of two plans:

[Riley to confirm what each plan covers.]

Support hours. Send a request any time. We answer most requests Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Central. For an emergency, like the site going down, we're reachable around the clock.

New development. Work beyond the plan you choose, such as a new feature or page template, is $165 an hour. We'll scope it and send an estimate before we start.

Card numbers never touch your website. Payments run through the payment processor.

Training

Your team gets a live training session that we record, short how-to videos for the tasks you'll do most often, and a written guide. Each person who needs access gets their own login with the right permissions.

Timeline

Cost

Third-party fees, such as payment processing and your email platform, are billed by those providers directly.

Photography

Real photos of your members will matter more than any design choice we make. We'll write the shot list, art direct the look, and connect you with a Sioux Falls photographer we trust. That way you avoid our travel costs and keep a local relationship for every event after launch.

Membership

If we're chosen, Tellwell will join SME as a full member. We'd like to be in the room with the people this site is for.

Phase two, when you're ready

Ideas for later include a member story video series, member logins with profiles members can edit themselves, sponsor success stories, and ongoing content support.

Relevant work: MSUM Foundation


The challenge. The Foundation's pages were scattered inside the university's website, with no real home of their own. Donors had to dig to find a reason or a way to give.

What we built. A donor-centered WordPress site with online giving, an Alma Base integration, and an event calendar that keeps alumni coming back. Student stories run throughout, so every gift has a face.

The result. Dragon Giving Day now has a home on the site, and the day has grown from about $157,000 to more than $1 million. Donor retention is 45.6%.

Our role. Messaging strategy, design, and build. msumfoundation.org

Relevant work: Broadband Association of ND

The challenge. BAND had just finished strategic planning, with a new mission and a sharper advocacy focus. Its site still reflected the old focus, and one person runs all its communications.

What we built. A refreshed site with a homepage built around the new mission and values. PDF newsletters became a searchable archive. Pages load faster, and maintenance documentation keeps updates simple for a one-person team.

Why it matters to SME. Like SME, BAND is a member association with a small staff. The site has to carry events, members, and a clear point of view without a developer on call.

Our role. Strategy, design, and build. broadbandnd.com

Relevant work: WellTold Conference

The challenge. WellTold happens once a year, and its website does the heavy lifting the rest of the year. It has to sell in-person and online tickets, introduce speakers, and give sponsors a reason to sign on.

What we built. A site with a ticket tier for every stage of the season, speaker pages, a sponsor wall and sponsor inquiry path, and a recap video that sells next year's event. [Attendance or sponsor count.]

Why it matters to SME. Swap "WellTold" for "Leadership Summit" and the jobs are the same. We've been on the organizer side of these pages, watching where people hesitate and what gets them to buy.

Our role. We own all of it: strategy, design, build, Ticket Tailor ticketing, and the event itself. welltoldconference.com

Your Team

The people doing the work

Riley Mack

Web Lead

Riley joined Tellwell as a content strategist and built his way into leading our web team. He works where design, story, and data meet, and he is relentless about whether a page actually moves someone to act. On this engagement that means a site where a person in crisis finds the right door quickly.

Sandie Kuehn

Design Lead

Fifteen years of design, spanning the largest rebrands in our region down to a weekly newsletter that has to look right on a phone. Sandie reads before she draws. She builds identity systems by asking what the person on the other end is trying to do, which is the right instinct for an organization whose audience is often reading under pressure.

Megan MacFarlane

Strategy Lead and Project Manager

Megan taught before she ran a nonprofit, and ran a nonprofit before she became a strategist. She has sat in the executive director's chair and knows what a board expects, what a funder expects, and what it costs a small team to say yes to a project like this one. She leads the listening sessions and the renaming analysis, and she is your day-to-day contact.

Max Kringen

Chief Storyteller

Max founded Tellwell in 2014 and is in the room for the strategy work, accountable to you for the engagement overall.

References

About Tellwell

Tellwell Story Co. is a creative studio in Fargo. We started in December 2014, and there are 13 of us today. We help nonprofits, higher education, and mission-driven organizations with strategy, design, film, and websites.

Montana Legal Services Association recently selected us for their rebrand and new website. We also host the WellTold conference every spring.

What we bring to a website.

  • WordPress. It's the platform we build on and support every day. We host and care for more than 90 WordPress sites.
  • UX and design. Every site starts with a site map and wireframes built from real audience research, before any visual design.
  • Development. Riley leads every build, with Work Hero adding development capacity.
  • SEO. Redirect mapping, metadata, structured data, and Search Console setup come standard on every launch.
  • Content. We write the pages that matter most, so you're never handed an empty template.

Fargo is a few hours up I-29 from Sioux Falls, so we'll be there in person when it counts.

A closing note

Thanks to Sami for the introduction, and thanks to you for putting together such a clear RFP. We'd be glad to help SME's website match the organization it represents.

Max Kringen

Founder and CEO, Tellwell Story Co.

max@wetellwell.com

wetellwell.com