Education Elevated
Every vertical foot a trekking team climbs pays for classrooms in one village in the Himalaya.
The context
Nineteen years of work, told out of order.
Education Elevated is a Colorado nonprofit that has funded the school in Chyangba Village, in Nepal's Solukhumbu district, since 2007. A Rotary hike in Colorado introduced its founder to a man who grew up in Chyangba, and the organization grew from that walk.
The way it raises money is unusual enough to be its best asset. Sponsors pledge an amount for every vertical foot a trekking team climbs, so the mountain does part of the fundraising. Teams have walked to Everest Base Camp and on to Chyangba since 2008. After the April 2015 earthquake, the village was rebuilt to withstand the next one.
None of that reached a first-time visitor. The organization came to us with a Wix site where nineteen years of expeditions, projects and photographs sat across pages that did not lead anywhere in particular. Someone arrived willing to give and left without a clear next step.
The idea
Answer the question a stranger asks first.
Before anyone gives, they want to know where the money goes.
So the homepage says it in three steps, in the order it actually happens: you join an expedition, sponsors back every vertical foot you gain, and Chyangba gets built. No mission statement, no appeal to guilt, just the mechanism.
We rebuilt the site on WordPress with a theme written for this project rather than a purchased template, so the structure could follow the story instead of bending the story to fit a layout.
Before and after
Same organization, told properly.
Before
After
Both shots are the top of the homepage at the same width. The work was not decoration: the old page opened without saying what the organization does with a donation, and the new one answers that in the first screen.
The work
A new educationelevated.org.
The homepage. The model up front, and a route to give from anywhere on the page.
The record, made browsable. Project pages document the schools, teachers and dormitories those vertical feet have paid for, and photo albums from 2008 to 2026 sit beside the news. Nineteen years of evidence stops being an archive and starts being the proof.
Room for the unplanned. An emergency appeal can take over the top of the site when one is needed, as with the 2026 Nepal flood relief, and come off again without a developer.
What the climbing pays for
The numbers the site now states plainly.
The outcome
A site the team runs without us.
Giving is present on every page without shouting, the story reads in the order a newcomer needs it, and the years of photographs finally work as evidence rather than as an attic.
The site runs on green hosting verified by the Green Web Foundation, and it was handed over unlocked. The team publishes news, albums and emergency appeals themselves.
"I would highly recommend Planet Media for any website design and programming work. They gave us a fresh look and made the back end a joy to work with."
Bruce Ward, Chairman, Education Elevated
Measured on the same tool in mobile mode, on 30 August against the previous site and on 10 September against this one. Anyone can rerun it.
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