A leadership accelerator's web presence, through several program eras

The situation

Cascador runs a selective accelerator for growth-stage founders building companies in Africa. Its ScaleUp programme takes a cohort through leadership development, strategy work and investor access, and alumni become eligible for a catalytic fund deploying up to $5M a year.

An organisation like this puts unusual demands on a website. It has to persuade three different audiences at once — founders deciding whether to apply, funders deciding whether to back the fund, and partner institutions deciding whether to lend their name — and it has to be rebuilt in part every year as a new cohort is selected, alumni accumulate and the programme itself evolves.

What the work involved

This was a long engagement rather than a project. Over six years the site carried the organisation through repeated changes of programme structure, cohort intake, funding model and positioning, each of which needed the information architecture revisited rather than just the copy swapped.

The build sits on WordPress with the Divi builder — the right call for a client whose staff needed to update cohort and alumni content themselves between engagements. But the design ambition ran past what the page builder does on its own, and a meaningful amount of custom CSS and JavaScript sits underneath the layouts to achieve the intended look and the repeating cohort and alumni patterns.

Why it mattered

Annual cohort programmes live or die on application volume and quality. The site is the front door for founders across a continent deciding whether this is a programme worth applying to, and the credibility signal for the institutional partners whose logos sit at the bottom of the page.

How the engagement ended

Cascador has since moved its working group to a team based in Nigeria, closer to the founders it serves. That is a sensible decision for the organisation and had nothing to do with the work — but it is worth recording honestly, because it is the kind of thing that happens to a concentrated client relationship and is the reason Bee Balm now structures engagements differently.