Clearinghouse CDFI
A Website That Screens Borrowers Before The Lending Team Does
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Clearinghouse CDFI’s website led with the mission and buried the criteria, so inquiries arrived from people who would never qualify for a commercial, real-estate-backed loan.
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Digital Silk ran the full strategy sequence before any design — discovery, digital strategy, site architecture, then messaging and conversion funnel — and split the site into separate borrower and investor paths.
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Through a full replatform, organic traffic rose 87% from the pre-launch low to the launch month, Domain Rating held at 45-47, and every qualified inquiry now lands in Salesforce already attributed.
The Challenge
Clearinghouse came to Digital Silk asking for a modern website. Underneath that brief was a harder problem that had been costing the lending team hours every week.
The Mission Led, The Criteria Were Buried
Visitors understood immediately that Clearinghouse helps people. What they never reached was the qualifying detail: that the loans are commercial, that they must be secured against real estate, that there is a seven-figure minimum, and that single-family mortgages and startup lending are out of scope entirely.
A Screening Burden On The Wrong Team
The gap between “they help people” and the actual lending criteria produced a steady stream of inquiries the team could not fund. Disqualifying them fell to the people who should have been underwriting deals.
One Website Serving Two Unrelated Audiences
Clearinghouse was not serving a single audience. It was serving borrowers and investors — two groups with almost nothing in common in what they need to see, what proof convinces them, or what a conversion even looks like.
The Funded Pipeline Wasn’t Coming From Borrowers
Discovery surfaced that the loans that actually closed were not arriving from direct borrowers. They came from brokers: intermediaries who already understand when a deal isn’t bankable and know exactly where to place it. The site had been designed as though the borrower was the only reader.
An Institutional Voice Mid-Shift
Clearinghouse was partway through a deliberate change in how it talks about itself. The site still spoke in the older register, and the new one had to keep the mission, the impact and the borrower stories intact while saying it differently — against a launch date tied to a fixed annual-meeting deadline.
The Solution
Digital Silk started with the funnel, not the homepage. The engagement ran the full agency sequence — discovery, digital strategy, site planning and architecture, then messaging and conversion funnel — before a single design was produced, with each stage approved in writing before the next began.
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One Question Behind Every Planning Decision
Every architectural and content choice was tested against the same question: who is actually on this page, and are they fundable? That question, not the homepage, was the starting point for the build. -
Two Front Doors Instead Of One Website
Rather than designing one site for a mixed audience, we designed two paths that split at the navigation itself. The borrower path and the investor path each carry their own funnel, their own proof set and their own definition of a qualified lead. Brokers — deal-literate and impatient with marketing language — became a primary design consideration on the borrower side rather than an afterthought. -
Positioning That Keeps The Mission And Adds The Criteria
The messaging moved with the architecture. The site now leads with proven capital that strengthens communities, a line doing two jobs at once: it keeps the mission and the impact intact, and it repositions Clearinghouse as what it actually is — a lender with a track record and real criteria, not a charity. -
Qualification As The Experience, Not The Fine Print
On the borrower side, we promoted “How the pre-application works” and “Who qualifies” to the top of the journey, built a lending-focus grid mapping every project type financed, stated the exclusions plainly on the page, organized borrower stories by project type so a prospect recognizes their own deal, and added quick-reference flyers and a borrower FAQ to absorb the questions that used to arrive by phone. -
Proof Built For Investors
On the investor side, the numbers carry the page: portfolio performance and financial metrics over time, named bank partners, a CEO message, investor reports, and an interactive impact map plotting the funded portfolio geographically.
The Results
A full replatform is the moment most sites lose ground. Clearinghouse gained it.
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87%increase in monthly organic traffic
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125ranking organic keywords, 23 of them in the top three positions
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47Domain Rating, up from 45 before, meaning no authority loss during the replatform
Our Custom Web Design Portfolio
1,000+ Completed Projects
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