A Visibility Gap for Local Commerce
In the Buckeye Lake region of east-central Ohio, it was becoming harder for neighbors to find the goods and services they needed online while supporting the local constituents and companies that made their communities unique. Small business owners and residents were feeling similar frustrations: when searching online, results often seemed to favor the biggest advertising budget rather than the best work at the most affordable price. Instead of locals being connected with service providers just down the road, community talent was being buried under a wave of higher-spend, national results. This gap made it difficult for small business owners, entrepreneurs, makers, mobile service providers, and other local organizations to stay visible.
A Curation-First Model, Customized for Regional Impact
The Heart of Our Community is the brainchild of Angela Centofanti– entrepreneur, community organizer, and owner of The Hub, a local studio dedicated to small business mentorship and support. Recognizing that local talent was being overlooked, Centofanti invested in community relationships and in building a technical framework that eventually morphed into a business directory & community engagement platform. Centofanti envisioned this tool as an opportunity to move folks away from algorithms and toward human-centered curation resting on real community relationships. “I was concerned that my project was too small for [Moonbeam Multimedia], but I found [their] passion for small business shone through and [they were] eager to take on my project,” says Centofanti. “Honestly, that was the turning point of my business.”
Moonbeam Multimedia’s role was to elevate the existing The Heart of Our Community build-out into a resilient, scalable web application ready for long-term community use. The original concept successfully demonstrated the directory's value; we focused on building high-performance infrastructure to support its growth and help a dedicated hometown team remain operationally lean. Over several months, we worked to significantly reduce technical debt, administrative overhead, and data entry time for the organization. We also developed a collection of new tools designed to organize community insights, accept job listings and community bulletins, point locals to community events, and more. Moonbeam Multimedia is proud to have engineered a fast, secure platform while reducing infrastructure costs for The Heart of Our Community by approximately 80% compared to previous methods.
Screens from The Heart of Our Community business directory.
Technical Architecture
We employed a modern, lightweight technical setup that is flexible enough to ensure the platform can grow and scale alongside the organization:
- SvelteKit web application framework: Chosen for its ability to deliver fast, reactive user experiences with minimal load time.
- Decoupled, open-source headless content management system (CMS) with RESTful API: Provides an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for non-technical content management while keeping the front-end flexible and secure.
- Worker architecture & automated, scalable edge deployment pipelines: Ensures very fast loading times and high availability by delivering content from locations physically closest to our users.
- Mobile-first, custom front-end design: Engineered to be accessible and performant on any device, ensuring reliability even in areas with limited connectivity.
We chose this high-efficiency architecture to ensure that the platform's digital footprint remains as small as possible while its community impact remains as large as possible.
Impact
The Heart of Our Community now works with dozens of local businesses and economic development entities and looks forward to expansion in the coming months and years. Moonbeam Multimedia delivered a system with an ~80% reduction in infrastructure costs compared to previous configurations, lowering operational and data management overhead and allowing for greater focus on community growth and business curation. Process improvements are saving the organization dozens of hours per month, recovered time that is being re-invested in the growth of the business and in the local community. The Heart of Our Community continues to serve as a vital resource that shines light on local success stories and calls out opportunities for neighbors to get together. Moonbeam Multimedia is deeply committed to supporting the institutions that strengthen our local economic fabric, and it was a privilege to contribute to the technical foundation of this essential community resource.