A pro-bono build for a local non-profit, given back to the community

The challenge

A local community organization had outgrown a free website builder. The site was slow on phones, awkward to edit, and unreachable for visitors using screen readers — a real problem for a group whose whole purpose is to serve everyone in its area. With a volunteer budget and no in-house developer, a paid agency rebuild was out of reach.

They needed more than a one-off favour. Whatever we built had to be something volunteers could keep running for years without us, and ideally something the next under-resourced non-profit wouldn't have to pay to reinvent.

Our approach

We treated it like any other engagement: scope the real needs, choose boring and durable technology, and leave the team better equipped than we found them. Instead of a bespoke black box, we built on a static, content-driven stack that hosts for free, loads fast, and can be edited without touching code.

Crucially, we separated the parts specific to this organization from the parts any non-profit could reuse — a starter template, accessibility defaults, and a deploy pipeline — and published those under a permissive open-source licence so the work benefits the whole community, not just one site.

• An accessible-by-default page template meeting WCAG AA contrast, focus, and semantics
• A simple content model so non-technical volunteers can update events and pages
• Free static hosting with automated deploys on every content change
• A documented, MIT-licensed starter repo other non-profits can fork and ship
• A lightweight maintenance plan: dependency updates, uptime checks, and quick fixes

The result

The organization now runs a site that is quick, inclusive, and self-serve — and the reusable foundation lives in public so the next group doesn't start from zero. The figures below reflect the goals we build these projects to hit; we share them as illustrative targets for this class of work rather than audited client metrics.