Eight Decades of “We Serve”
Founded in 1944, the Osseo Lions Club is a chapter of Lions Clubs International — the world’s largest service organization, with more than 1.35 million members in over 200 countries. Based in Osseo, Minnesota’s northwest metro, the club is a philanthropic, all-volunteer organization connected to a worldwide movement of people who live out a simple motto: We Serve.
For more than 80 years, the Osseo Lions have been showing up for their community. Over 50 dedicated members consistently volunteer their time, talents, and financial support to organize a year-round calendar of events and programs that bring Osseo together. From the beloved annual Osseo Lions Roar festival — featuring a parade, the Taste of Osseo, a vendor marketplace, marathon, and full community celebration — to the InterMarque Spring Classic Car Show, the Wastebasket Revue Scholarship program for Osseo Senior High students, food drives, vision initiatives, and more, this club doesn’t just participate in the community. It is the community.
And 2026 is shaping up to be their biggest year yet: the 50th anniversary of the Lions Roar festival, coinciding with the nation’s 250th birthday. Two landmark celebrations that deserve a digital presence worthy of the occasion.
A Website That Had Become a Liability
Despite everything the Osseo Lions Club brings to its community, the club’s digital presence was telling a very different story.
The club’s website at osseolions.org was built years ago on a custom WordPress theme using the Unyson framework. What was once a functional site had deteriorated into an unstable platform that created more problems than it solved — and was quietly becoming a liability for the organization.
The site had lost its mobile responsiveness, meaning layouts collapsed on phones and tablets. For a community organization whose visitors are largely discovering events and activities on the go, that’s a significant disconnect. The site also experienced chronic instability — going up and down unpredictably, eroding trust with both visitors and search engines over time.
Behind the scenes, aging theme code and plugin conflicts were causing layouts to break and content to disappear without warning. Updating the site required specialized WordPress knowledge that most volunteer members simply didn’t have, making routine content changes a frustrating ordeal. And because site management depended on one person with the technical expertise to keep things running, the club faced a dangerous single point of failure: if that person were unavailable tomorrow, the organization would be left scrambling to fix a broken site — or facing hundreds, potentially thousands of dollars in emergency repair costs.
On top of all of that, the WordPress installation demanded ongoing server management, security patches, and plugin updates that were well beyond the capacity of a volunteer-run organization. And the recurring downtime was damaging the site’s standing with search engines, limiting the club’s ability to reach new community members and supporters online.
The bottom line? The club was heading toward a digital implosion. Without intervention, the next major outage could leave the Osseo Lions without a web presence during their most important year — the 50th anniversary of the Lions Roar. Back2Basics was brought in to address this ahead of the crisis, not in reaction to it.
A Refreshed Brand Identity
Before touching the website, Back2Basics refined the club’s visual identity. In early 2025, a refreshed logo started rolling out — one that honors the trusted Lions International brand while clearly highlighting Osseo’s local identity.
The updated artwork keeps the familiar Lions colors and emblem but presents them in a way that works better across today’s digital and print platforms. It’s a subtle but important evolution: the mark feels modern and professional without losing the heritage and recognition the club has built over decades.
This refinement also addressed a practical compliance issue. In 2025, platforms like Meta introduced automated checks that led to account suspensions for Lions clubs using the international logo without local adjustments. The updated Osseo mark reduces that risk while maintaining a proud affiliation with the global Lions family — a small change with significant real-world impact for the club’s social media presence and advertising capabilities.
Building a Digital Home on Squarespace
The centerpiece of the project is migrating the club’s web presence from the aging WordPress installation to Squarespace — a modern, secure, mobile-first platform purpose-built for organizations that need reliability without technical overhead.
The decision to move to Squarespace wasn’t made lightly. Back2Basics walked club leadership through the trade-offs, comparing flexibility, ease of editing, long-term maintenance, security, and cost. For a volunteer-run organization where multiple people need to update content independently — without specialized technical knowledge — Squarespace offered the strongest combination of power and simplicity.
The differences are night and day. Where the WordPress site suffered from broken responsiveness, Squarespace delivers fully responsive, mobile-first templates. Where recurring outages eroded trust, Squarespace provides enterprise-grade hosting with 99.98% uptime. Where content updates once required WordPress expertise or paid support, Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor means any trained volunteer can manage the site. And where the old setup demanded manual server patching and complex hosting management, Squarespace handles SSL, updates, security monitoring, and hosting as an all-in-one platform — with predictable monthly costs and no surprise bills.
A Content-Rich Experience Built Around Community
The new Squarespace site isn’t just a technology upgrade — it’s a complete reimagining of how the Osseo Lions Club shows up online. The design uses a bold blue and gold color scheme drawn from Lions International’s heritage, paired with clean modern typography and rich community photography. The tagline — “We Serve. We Roar.” — sets the tone from the moment visitors arrive.
The homepage alone tells the full story of who the Osseo Lions are and what they do. A striking hero section features a quote from Lions International President A.P. Singh, with a prominent gold “Become A Lion Member” call to action. Below that, a row of quick-action buttons — Upcoming Events, Need Assistance, Lions Roar Sponsor, and Parade Registration — puts every key action one tap away.
The site unfolds into a welcome and mission section sharing the club’s history and values, a Giving Spotlight featuring a real student story from the Wastebasket Revue Scholarship program (this year highlighting Annette, an Osseo Senior High student heading to UW-Stout for CSTEMM), and a full Lions Roar 2026 hub with dates, ticket sales, Taste of Osseo details, Parade Day programming, the marathon, and vendor information — all in one central location for the first time.
Featured events like the InterMarque Spring Car Show POP-UP have dedicated sections with dates, locations, and community photography. An expandable Get Involved section offers clear pathways for volunteering, charitable gambling, and event sponsorship. Sponsor recognition highlights Platinum and Gold-tier partners with badges and a link to the full sponsor list. An interactive events calendar keeps the community up to date on meetings, projects, articles, and activities month by month. And a newsletter signup and blog feed keep the connection alive between events.
Several sections are still in active development as the project nears launch, including expanded About content, deeper event pages, the full Lions Roar community event hub, Parade and Vendor Pop-up Registration, Sponsorship highlights, Getting Involved pathways, and donation request functionality. Each piece is being built with the same care and community focus that defines the rest of the site.
An Approach Built on Volunteer Empowerment
Back2Basics’ partnership model put volunteer empowerment at the center of every decision. Rather than simply building a website and handing it off, the team embedded with the club’s leadership to understand how volunteer-run organizations actually operate. The approach was guided by three principles:
Shared Ownership — The new site is designed so that trained volunteers can manage content independently. Multiple people can update events, add photos, and post news — eliminating the single point of failure that put the old site at constant risk.
Proactive, Not Reactive — This project began before the crisis hit, not after. Back2Basics identified the looming instability and proposed intervention ahead of a catastrophic site failure — protecting the club during its most important year.
Mission Alignment — Every design decision serves the club’s core goal: making it easier for community members to find events, volunteer, sponsor, and donate. Technology stays invisible; service stays visible.
The project has unfolded across several phases. The brand identity refresh began rolling out in early 2025. Discovery and strategy work followed in late 2025 through early 2026, with Back2Basics auditing the existing site, documenting pain points, and mapping the content architecture. Design and development kicked into gear in spring 2026, bringing the homepage and content sections to life. A public announcement of the redesign was published in May 2026, with the remaining pages in final development. The new site is on track to go live by the end of June 2026 — just in time for the 50th anniversary Lions Roar in September.
Looking Ahead
As the Osseo Lions Club steps into this new chapter, its mission remains unchanged: We Serve. What changes is their capacity to reach, engage, and empower their community through modern digital tools.
The refreshed brand and new website will give the club a reliable, professional, and welcoming online presence — one that invites the next generation of volunteers, advocates, and sponsors to join the movement. With a platform that volunteers can manage themselves, the club’s digital presence will finally keep pace with the energy and dedication its members bring to Osseo every single day.
The 50th anniversary Lions Roar — September 11 and 12, 2026 — will be the first major event showcased on the new platform, featuring the all-new Taste of Osseo, the traditional parade, a marathon, a vendor pop-up fair, and a full community celebration. It’s a milestone moment, and now the Osseo Lions will have a digital home worthy of the occasion.
Is Your Organization’s Website Holding You Back?
If your nonprofit, service club, or community organization is struggling with an outdated website that’s hard to update, unreliable, or no longer reflects who you are — you’re not alone. Many volunteer-led groups face the same challenges the Osseo Lions did: aging platforms, technical barriers, and the risk of losing their online presence at the worst possible time.
Back2Basics helps community organizations think through goals, audiences, platform choices, and long-term sustainability before a single page is built — so the final site works harder, looks better, and is simpler to manage over time.
Ready to explore what a website refresh could look like for your organization? Visit withthepowerof2.com or use the contact options there to schedule a discovery conversation about your project. Let’s build something your team can be proud of — and actually manage on their own.
