Why we love working with nonprofits and community organizations

Some of our favorite projects are for organizations that run on volunteers, parents and small staffs with big jobs. A concert band that needs new members and a full audience. A statewide group of parents sharing research. Two North Marion County organizations that help visitors, job seekers and local businesses find what they need. We like this work, and we've learned a lot from it.

What makes nonprofit and community work different

A company website usually has one main job: bring in customers. A community organization's site has several. It has to welcome newcomers, answer the same questions volunteers keep getting, keep members up to date, and give funders and partners a reason to trust the group. Often the people who update the site are volunteers who have a day job.

So we plan around the people who will use the site and the people who will keep it current. We ask who visits, what they're looking for, and who on the team has time to post the next event. The answers shape everything from the menu to how a page gets edited.

Willamette Valley Concert Band

The Willamette Valley Concert Band is a nonprofit concert wind ensemble in the mid-Willamette Valley, close to our home in Albany. We designed their logo, branding and website, and we keep the site running and up to date as the season changes.

Concerts, rehearsals and calls for new players come and go all year, so the site has to be easy to change. Julie Buchert from the band put it this way in her review: "Logan has done a great job with our web site and he's good about fixing things that aren't working or adding things as they come up."

Oregon Screen-Free Parenting

Oregon Screen-Free Parenting is a parent-led community of Oregon families. They connect low-screen families through local groups, share research on how screens affect kids, and help parents push for hands-on learning in their schools. It's our most data-heavy community project so far.

The site has three big pieces:

• A research library. More than a hundred plain-language summaries of studies on screens and kids. Every summary says how strong the evidence is and links to the original study, and parents can filter by age group, topic, region and study type.
• A school district tracker. What's known about device use in Oregon school districts, gathered from public records, district documents and news reports. Each entry is labeled as verified, reported in the news, parent-reported or unknown, so readers know how much weight each one can carry.
• A parent toolkit. Templates, guides and research briefs, laid out as four steps from a parent's first question to a specific ask of the school board.

None of that helps if a tired parent can't find it at 9pm. The hardest part of the project was making a lot of information easy to understand and easy to move through: clear labels, filters that make sense, plain language, and a path from "I'm worried about this" to "here's what I can do."

Explore North Marion and the North Marion Business Service Alliance

Not every project is a website. For Explore North Marion, which helps visitors plan trips to the small towns between Portland and Salem, we handle social media and content management. Tulip season, festivals and farm stands each have their moment, and the posts need to show up when people are planning.

We do the same for the North Marion Business Service Alliance, which connects job seekers and businesses in North Marion County with employers, business resources and events. Their audience is different, so the voice is too: practical, local, and focused on what's coming up next.

What this work has taught us

• Write for the person who's never heard of you. A new parent, a first-time visitor or a retired trumpet player should understand what you do in a few seconds.
• Make updates easy. If posting an event takes a developer, the events page will go stale. We set sites up so your team can make everyday changes.
• Show your sources. Trust is everything for a community group. Oregon Screen-Free Parenting links every research summary to the original study for that reason.
• Build for everyone. Community sites serve people of every age and ability, so we build to current accessibility guidelines from the start.

Tomena and Logan lead every one of these projects, from the first call through launch and the months after. You talk to us directly, not an account manager.