01 BLUF
The Bottom Line:
- Migrated the Virginia Headwaters Council and Camp Shenandoah from Tentaroo to WordPress with ACF-Pro, with Black Pug for registration, giving volunteer staff full control of a CMS that no longer needs a technical operator.
- Redesigned the Camp Leader guides for clarity and usability for the unit leaders who depend on them.
- Both sites launched January 2025. Camp registration has improved year over year for two consecutive years.
02 Our Role
Council and Camp Site Architecture, WordPress and ACF-Pro Build, Registration System Migration, Camp Leader Guide Redesign
03 The Details
How the engagement came together
John serves as VP of Technology and Communications for the Virginia Headwaters Council. He led this work through Meticulous as a volunteer engagement.
Dave Seal designed the council and lodge brand identity as VP of Marketing in 2018 to 2020 and remains an active design partner for the council, including ongoing patch and event logo work. His brand foundation is what the new digital surfaces carry forward. The work was applying that brand to a CMS volunteers could run themselves, not redoing it.
Client overview
The Virginia Headwaters Council serves over 4,000 Scouts across the Shenandoah Valley and central Virginia. The council operates Camp Shenandoah, a 500-acre Scout reservation near Swoope that has hosted summer camp programs since 1950.
The Challenge
Both the main council site (virginiaheadwaters.org) and Camp Shenandoah (campshenandoah.org) ran on Tentaroo, an all-in-one platform with a rigid editing interface. Volunteers struggled to update content. The system's limitations meant the council could not communicate well with families. The Camp Leader guides, the resources unit leaders rely on to prepare for summer camp, were dated and hard to navigate.
The core mismatch: an organization that runs on volunteer effort had a CMS that required technical expertise to operate. That is the wrong tradeoff.
Our Approach
We migrated the registration system to Black Pug and rebuilt both sites on WordPress with ACF-Pro. The architecture gives non-technical volunteers full control.
The key design decision was a kit of predefined content blocks. Structured page-building components let any volunteer update the site without writing code or calling for help. The council site focuses on membership, events, and volunteer resources. The Camp Shenandoah site showcases the camp experience and streamlines summer camp registration.
Rebuilt websites for both the Council and Camp.
We also heavily used ACF Custom Post Types to mimic database modeling we'd typically do in a custom app. Unit detail pages as well as a Where to Go Camping Guide were both built out in an easy to edit fashion that provided access to the volunteers as well as making the content more usable for visitors and members.
Example Unit and Camping Guide built out.
Print, in concert with the digital
The brand reaches into print as well, designed in concert with the sites so the whole system reads as one. We produced a coordinated set of guides: the Camp Leader's & Parents' Guide that unit leaders rely on to prepare for summer camp at Camp Shenandoah, and the Executive Board Guide that orients council leadership. Each was reworked for clarity, hierarchy, and navigability across both printed and digital PDF formats.
- OUTCOMES
- Both sites launched in January 2025.
- Volunteers can update content without writing code or calling for technical help.
- Per-transaction registration fees reduced through the Black Pug migration.
- Families find what they need on the public sites faster.
- Camp registration has improved year over year for two consecutive years, an outcome of broader council effort that the digital foundation supports.
- Engagement is ongoing.