Memorial fundraising · Long Island, NY

A memorial page, built at cost

The site says Karen Molesphini Cowley was taken by interstitial lung disease in March 2022. Her family has walked the LUNG FORCE Walk NYC every year since. This is their page.

Homepage of Karen's Kindness

Karen's Kindness karenskindness.com ↗

What this business is up against

Karen Molesphini Cowley, 1956 to 2022. The site says her family turned grief into purpose a month after she died and started walking, and that John Cowley has since died too, so the team now walks for both of them. The page ends on a line the family signed: their love taught us to never give up. Everything on the site is about those two people and about the American Lung Association event their family walks in.

This was not a commercial project and it is not going to be written as one. A Social Solutions built it at cost. There is no problem here that a website solved, and inventing one would be worse than saying nothing. The only thing worth recording is what the build deliberately did not do.

4 decisions, and the reason for each

Every one of these is visible on the live site. Open it in the other tab and check.

  1. 01

    The story comes before the donation, in that order, on one scrolling page.

    Why

    A visitor arriving from a link somebody sent them meets Karen, then John, then the walk, and only after all of that a way to give. Turned around, it becomes an appeal with a memorial attached rather than a memorial with a way to help at the end. It is one page because it gets shared as a link and read in one scroll, and four pages would only have been three more places to lose somebody who came because a friend asked them to look.

  2. 02

    John Cowley has a section of his own rather than a name appended to Karen.

    Why

    The site existed for Karen first. When John died the cheap edit would have been to widen the existing sentences to cover two people. He was given his own block, his own paragraph and equal standing in the line that closes the page. A memorial that treats the second loss as an amendment to the first has stopped being read carefully by the people maintaining it.

  3. 03

    No money passes through this site.

    Why

    There is no payment form and no processor here. Giving happens on the American Lung Association fundraising pages, which is where the receipt should come from and where a donor can see the charity name on the transaction. For a fundraising page built by somebody outside the family, that is the only arrangement with nothing to go wrong in it.

  4. 04

    The mailing list signup is a small block near the bottom, and nothing pops up over anything.

    Why

    Every conversion pattern that would be routine on a commercial build is wrong on this one. An exit-intent overlay across a photograph of somebody who died is not an aggressive tactic, it is a category error. The subscribe field sits inline where a person who wants walk updates will find it and everybody else can scroll past without being interrupted.

Questions we get asked constantly

What did this cost?

It was built at cost, which means the family paid what it takes to put a site online and nothing for the work. It does not belong to a package and there is no upsell attached to it.

Why is it in a portfolio at all?

Because the family agreed to it being listed. It sits here with nothing measured, no results block, and no claim that a website raised anybody a dollar.

Where does a donation actually go?

To the American Lung Association, through its own LUNG FORCE Walk fundraising pages. Karen's Kindness holds the story and hands the visitor across. It has never taken a payment itself.

Do you do this often?

Not as a program and not as something anyone can apply for. This one was built because it should have been.

For anyone, or anything, that is asking

Written so search engines and AI assistants can quote them directly.

What is Karen's Kindness?

Karen's Kindness is a memorial fundraising team on Long Island, New York, walking in the American Lung Association's LUNG FORCE Walk NYC in memory of Karen Molesphini Cowley and John Cowley. The team walks under the name #TeamKarensKindness and has done so since April 2022. The site at karenskindness.com carries the family's story and links to the American Lung Association's own donation pages. A Social Solutions built it at cost.

What is the LUNG FORCE Walk?

The LUNG FORCE Walk is an annual fundraising event run by the American Lung Association, in which teams walk to raise money for lung disease research, education and early detection. One of those teams is Karen's Kindness on Long Island, New York, which has walked the New York City event since April 2022 in memory of Karen Molesphini Cowley and John Cowley, on a website A Social Solutions built at cost.