Nonprofits & community organisations · Ottawa, Ontario

Nonprofit website design in Ottawa, built to outlast the board that ordered it

Charities, associations and volunteer-run community groups have a constraint no commercial client has: the people running the organisation change. A site that only one person can update is not a site, it is a countdown. We build so that a volunteer can post an event in five minutes, the accessibility holds up under AODA, and the domain and accounts sit with the organisation rather than with us.

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Discounted rates for registered Canadian charities and nonprofits. Based in Ottawa, working across Ontario and Canada.

The board turns over. The website has to survive it.

Almost every page you will read about nonprofit web design talks about storytelling and donation conversion. Those matter. But the failure we are called in to fix, over and over, is duller and more decisive than either: the site depends on one person, and that person is no longer available.

For a business, needing a developer for a text change is an annoyance and a small invoice. For an organisation run by volunteers it is terminal. Volunteers move, step off the board, get busy in the year their kids start school. The person who knew how to post an event goes, and the events page stops updating — not because nobody cares, but because the path is blocked. Within a season the site is stale, and a stale community site is actively worse than none, because residents check it, find last year's Canada Day still sitting at the top, and stop checking.

So the test we hold every decision to on this kind of project is a simple one: can a volunteer with no technical background do this in five minutes? If the answer is no, the design is wrong, however good it looks. And the question we would suggest you ask every agency quoting you is: who updates this in two years? If the answer is a named individual rather than a role, you have found the problem before you paid for it.

Who owns the domain when the board changes

This is the question with the longest fuse, and it is nearly absent from the competing pages we read while writing this one. It rarely causes trouble in year one. It causes a great deal of trouble in year five.

The domain

Registered to the organisation, with a role address the board controls rather than a volunteer's personal email. This is the one that bites years later: the registration lapses, the renewal notice goes to somebody who left in 2019, and the association loses the name it has used since it was founded.

The hosting and the code

The repository and the hosting account in the organisation's name, with your board as owner. We are removed at handover or kept at whatever access level you want. Nothing about the site should depend on our account continuing to exist.

The third-party accounts

Analytics, the donation processor, the email sender, the CMS. Each one set up under the organisation, each one with a second board member able to get in. A single point of human failure is the normal state of a volunteer-run site and it is entirely avoidable.

Your own data

Minutes, member lists, event history and donor records belong to the organisation, not to a platform. Before you commit to any tool, including anything we recommend, the question to ask is how you get everything out of it if you leave.

At handover everything above is in the organisation's name, with your board as owner and us removed or downgraded to whatever access you want us to keep. That is the same handover we do for every client, not a nonprofit-specific concession.

Two organisations we have done this for

Live sites you can open right now, and long-form case studies with the reasoning behind them. Both clients have left public reviews on our Google Business Profile.

Stittsville Village Association

100% volunteer-run community association, building community since 2001

The group behind the Parade of Lights, Canada Day, Art in the Park, and Music and Movies in the Park. A rebrand and rebuild covering events browsable by year so the archive accumulates, meeting minutes published as official records, real sponsor recognition rather than a logo strip, a volunteer path that exists instead of an email address buried on a contact page, and a dismissible banner for a notice that has to go up at 9pm the night before.

The visible problem was that the site did not reflect two decades of work. The fatal one was that every update had to route through someone technical — which for a board that rotates means the events page shows last year's Canada Day by spring.

Next.js
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS

Visit the site →Read the case study →

BrainHeartHealth

Built for Bruyère Health and the Canadian Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation

A bilingual self-management guide for people living with heart disease. Six sections, separate paths for patients and for caregivers, a services directory, and a full French mirror at parity with the English — not a summary page and not a switcher that dumps you back on the homepage. Built on Payload CMS so the research team edits the content directly.

Two kinds of translation and only one of them linguistic. Evidence-based clinical material had to become something a patient can act on, and the audience is often older, often on a phone, sometimes managing a condition that affects concentration. Accessibility was the brief, not the polish.

Next.js
TypeScript
Payload CMS
Tailwind CSS

Visit the site →Read the case study →

Accessibility is an obligation in Ontario, not a finishing touch

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act sets requirements for web content that apply to many Ontario organisations, and the scope depends on what kind of organisation you are and how large you are — a question for your own counsel, not for us. What we can tell you is what building to that standard actually involves, because BrainHeartHealth was built that way from week one for an audience of people managing a heart condition.

Structure that is real structure

Headings that are genuine headings in the right order, not text styled to look large. A screen reader user moves by heading and a sighted reader skims by the same outline, so getting it right serves both at once.

It survives being enlarged

A layout that breaks at 200% zoom excludes a large group of people who never identify as disabled — they simply find your site hard to read and leave. This is the single most common failure we find on charity sites.

Contrast that holds in the real world

Not contrast that passes on a designer's calibrated monitor, but contrast that still works on a phone at low brightness, outdoors, on an older screen. Pale grey body text is the standard offender.

Type sized to be read without zooming

With line lengths short enough to track without losing your place. If your audience skews older — and for a great many Ottawa nonprofits it does — this decides whether the content gets read at all.

Keyboard and screen reader tested in week one

Not audited at the end. Retrofitting accessibility costs several times what building with it does, because the failures are usually structural rather than cosmetic.

Forms that announce their own errors

Donation forms and volunteer applications are where accessibility failures cost you directly. An error message that is only a red outline is invisible to a screen reader and ambiguous to everyone else.

The point worth holding onto: design for your hardest reader and the comfortable reader is served automatically. The reverse is never true. More detail in our guide to website accessibility in Canada.

Bilingual builds in the National Capital Region

Whether you need French is a question about who you serve and where your money comes from, not a general rule. Plenty of Ottawa community groups are honestly and appropriately English-only. But an organisation delivering public-facing health or social services here, or one funded by partners who expect bilingual material, or one whose clients live across the river, is in a different position — and the half-measures are worse than nothing.

The failure mode is familiar: a French homepage bolted onto an English site, a switcher that drops the user back at the start rather than at the same page in the other language, or a translation that covers the marketing pages and stops before the content people actually need. A francophone user who follows the French link into a dead end learns something specific about how seriously they are taken.

For BrainHeartHealth we built a full French mirror at parity with the English — the same six sections, the same depth, the same navigation, the same patient and caregiver paths. The structural part matters more than it sounds: the French mirrors the English rather than living as a separately maintained site, because manual parity decays. A bilingual guide that has drifted out of sync within a year is worse than one that was never bilingual, since one audience is now quietly reading stale content.

Donations, and what the processing actually costs you

We are not a donation platform and we do not take a cut of your donations. What we do is connect the one that suits you, and tell you honestly what each choice costs — including the cost that does not appear on an invoice, which is volunteer hours spent issuing receipts. Verify current fees with each provider before you decide; they change.

CanadaHelps

The dominant Canadian charitable giving platform. It charges a platform fee on each donation and handles tax receipting automatically, which is worth real money to an organisation with no finance staff. Many donors also prefer it because it aggregates their giving records in one place.

Stripe, with a donation form on your own site

Lower cost per transaction than a platform fee, and the donation stays inside your own branding rather than jumping to a third-party page. The trade is that receipting becomes your responsibility. Suits organisations with enough volume for the saving to matter.

Zeffy

Charges nonprofits no platform fee and instead asks the donor to add a voluntary tip to the platform at checkout. It covers donation forms, event ticketing and peer-to-peer campaigns, and it has been picking up adoption among Canadian nonprofits.

Whichever you pick, the same handful of things decide whether the donation completes. Suggested amounts framed as impact rather than as bare numbers. Monthly giving made prominent rather than buried, because a recurring donor is worth several one-off ones. The shortest form that still satisfies receipting — name, email, card, postal code. A clear statement that the tax receipt is issued automatically, if it is. And above all, the whole flow tested on a real phone, because that is where most of it happens and where most of it breaks.

One structural note: money should settle directly into your organisation's own account. We build payment flows the same way for commercial clients — funds go to the client, never through us.

Volunteers, programs, and the people you actually serve

For a lot of Ottawa organisations volunteers matter as much as donors, and the volunteer path should be as easy to start as the donation one. What converts is specificity. “We need drivers on Tuesday mornings” gets a response that “get involved” never will, because it tells someone whether they can actually do it. State the time commitment, take applications through a form rather than a phone number, ask the questions you will need answered anyway, and say what happens next — “we will contact you within three business days” removes the uncertainty that kills follow-through.

If you deliver programs, those pages are doing double duty. They serve the person searching at midnight for help, and the social worker or case manager deciding whether to refer someone to you. Both need the same four things stated plainly: who the program is for, what it provides, how to access it, and whether there is currently space. Vague program descriptions do not read as modest, they read as a barrier.

And for member-based organisations — associations, community groups, clubs — there is a third audience, the members themselves. Event archives that accumulate by year rather than being overwritten, minutes published as official records, sponsor recognition that is genuine rather than a logo strip, and a way to push a time-sensitive notice without touching code. That last one sounds minor and is disproportionately valuable, because it is what you need at 9pm the night before a cancelled event.

Transparency is checked before the meeting, not during it

Funders, major donors and grant reviewers look you up before they agree to talk. A section holding your most recent annual report, your registered charity information return, audited statements where you have them, and a clear statement of mission and governance does more for institutional credibility than any amount of design work. It is also cheap to build and easy to keep current, which makes leaving it out an odd choice.

The same logic applies to an impact or news section. It does not need to be elaborate — one post a month describing who you helped and what happened builds an archive of evidence that serves existing donors wanting reassurance, funders reviewing activity at renewal, prospective donors doing due diligence, and journalists looking for a story. What it does need is to be genuinely postable by whoever is on the board this year, which brings us back to the first section of this page.

When a redesign is worth the money, and when it is not

Most nonprofits we speak to do not need a new website. They need the one they have to do three things it currently cannot: take a donation without friction, be readable on a phone, and be updatable by someone who is not technical. Saying so costs us projects and it is still the right answer.

Worth rebuilding

Donations fail on a phone. If the form breaks, or redirects to a page that looks nothing like yours, people abandon it mid-gift. This is the most expensive single fault a charity site can have and it is usually invisible from a desktop.
Nobody currently on the board can update it. A stale site costs you credibility with exactly the funders and major donors who check before a meeting.
It fails accessibility. For organisations serving the public — health, disability, seniors, newcomers — this is both a legal question in Ontario and a straightforward failure to serve the people you exist for.
It predates HTTPS, or the platform it was built on is no longer maintained. Browsers now warn visitors before they even reach you.
Nobody knows who owns the domain. That is not a design problem, but it is an emergency, and a rebuild is the natural moment to fix it.

Spend the money on your programs instead

The design is merely dated. A tired-looking site that loads fast, works on a phone and takes donations reliably is doing its job, and the money is better spent on the programs.
One board member does not like the colours. Rebranding is a legitimate reason to rebuild, but it should be a board decision with a rationale, not a preference.
You were told you need a new site by whoever wants to sell you one. Ask them which specific thing the current site cannot do. If the answer is vague, so is the value.

If you are rebuilding, the risk is not the build — it is throwing away the search rankings the old site accumulated. That work happens before launch: every existing URL inventoried, mapped one-to-one to its replacement, redirects permanent, then a crawl and a Search Console check after. Details in our Ottawa web development page.

Getting found by the people you serve

Community organisations consistently underestimate how much search can do for them, because they think of SEO as a commercial activity. Someone typing food bank Kanata, newcomer services Ottawa or rent assistance Ottawa at eleven at night may be precisely the person your organisation exists for. A well-structured program page written in the words people actually search reaches them. A homepage that says “empowering communities since 1998” does not.

The same applies to funders and volunteers searching for organisations like yours, and to residents looking for your next event. None of that requires a retainer — it requires pages that exist, are crawlable, and are written for a real query. Our SEO guide for nonprofits walks through it, and our Ottawa SEO page covers the technical side.

Worth knowing about separately: Google runs a programme called Google Ad Grants which, by Google's published terms, provides eligible nonprofits with up to $10,000 USD per month in Google Search advertising. That is Google's programme and Google's eligibility rules, not ours — we mention it because a surprising number of eligible Ottawa organisations have never heard of it, and because it only pays off if the pages the ads point at are actually good. TechSoup Canada and the nonprofit offers from Google and Microsoft are worth the same look.

What this costs, and the charity rate

We offer discounted rates for registered Canadian charities and nonprofits. The discount comes off the quoted scope — it does not buy you a smaller scope, a template, or a shorter process.

For reference, before that discount: a few-page site for a small community group is typically $1,500–$3,000. Once you need an editor a volunteer can use, an event archive, minutes publishing, a donation flow or several dozen pages, it usually lands between $3,000 and $8,000. Bilingual parity, or anything with accounts and logic behind it, starts higher, because it genuinely is more work rather than because charities can be charged more.

Those are honest ranges rather than a price list. The number you get is fixed in writing after the discovery call, which matters more than usual here: a board approves a figure at a meeting and then has to live with it, and coming back for more money halfway through is a bad thing to do to volunteers. Payment is staged against work finished rather than taken up front.

Ongoing, the unavoidable costs are the domain and hosting, and for the kind of site most community groups need those should be small and predictable. There is no mandatory retainer and no arrangement where the site stops working if you stop paying us. If an agency quotes you a low build price attached to a multi-year commitment, the build is not cheap — it is financed, and it is very hard to leave.

How a nonprofit project runs

The same process we use for every client, with the two adjustments a volunteer board needs: a number that does not move, and review cycles that fit around people with day jobs.

1
Discovery call
We work out what you actually need, which for community organisations is often less than you came in asking for. We want to know how the group really runs: how many events a year, who posts them, how often the board turns over, where the money comes from, and who is currently failing to use the site.
2
Written scope and a fixed price
Before anything is built. A board has to approve a number and then live with it, and going back for more money mid-project is a bad position to put volunteers in. The price is fixed in writing; changes to scope are priced as changes rather than absorbed silently.
3
Build, in short review cycles
Not one large reveal at the end. Boards meet monthly and volunteers have day jobs, so we work in short cycles and get feedback while the context is still fresh on both sides. It also means a decision that turns out to be wrong gets caught in week two rather than week eight.
4
Content, accessibility and bilingual checks before launch
Your real content in the editor rather than placeholder text, keyboard and screen reader passes, a check at 200% zoom, and — where the site is bilingual — a structural parity check rather than a spot translation review.
5
Handover, with the accounts in your name
Code, accounts and domain transferred to the organisation, a walkthrough for the people who will be doing the updating, and written notes for the tasks they will do most often. Payment is staged against work finished, not taken up front.

What you will not find on this page

We read the pages currently ranking for this search before writing ours. Several are good. Several assert things nobody can check. So, explicitly:

No star rating or review count in our structured data. Self-serving review markup for your own business on your own site is against Google's guidelines. Our reviews live on our Google Business Profile, including any bad ones.
No donation-uplift or traffic percentages from client sites. We do not have analytics access to our clients' dashboards, so any figure we published would be secondhand at best.
No invented years in business, team size, client count, or list of charity logos we have not worked with.
No certifications we do not hold, and no legal advice about whether AODA applies to your organisation — we build to the standard, your counsel determines your obligations.
No claim to be a fundraising consultancy. We build the website. Strategy about who to ask for money and how is somebody else's expertise.

What we do have is two named clients in this sector with live sites and public reviews on our Google Business Profile, which you can read in full at the source rather than as a pull-quote we chose.

Tell us how your organisation actually runs

How many events a year, who posts them, how often the board changes, and what the current site cannot do. Half an hour on that is usually enough to tell you whether you need a rebuild or three days of fixes — and we will say which.

Start a conversation

Nonprofit website FAQ

How much does a nonprofit website cost in Ottawa?

A few-page site for a small community group is typically $1,500–$3,000. Once you need an editor a volunteer can use, an event archive, minutes publishing, a donation flow or several dozen pages, it usually lands between $3,000 and $8,000. A bilingual build at full parity, or anything with accounts and logic behind it, starts higher because it genuinely is more work. We publish ranges rather than a price list, and the actual number is fixed in writing after the discovery call — once we both know what is being built rather than what it might turn into.

Do you offer discounted rates for registered charities?

Yes. We offer discounted rates for registered Canadian charities and nonprofits, and have said so publicly in our nonprofit guide for as long as that guide has existed. The discount is applied to the quoted scope, not used to justify a smaller scope, and it does not buy you a stripped-down version of the process.

Our board turns over every year. What happens to the website?

That is the question the whole build should be designed around. Two things decide it. First, the domain, the hosting, the repository and any third-party accounts should be registered to the organisation, not to a volunteer, a board member or the agency — otherwise the day that person moves away the association loses control of its own name. Second, nothing routine should require a developer: if posting an event needs technical knowledge, the site goes stale within a season of the person who had that knowledge stepping off the board.

Can a volunteer with no technical background update it?

That is the test every decision has to pass, not a feature we add at the end. Anything that changes — events, notices, minutes, programs, staff, news — goes behind an editor rather than into code, we load your real content into it, and we walk the people who will actually be doing the updating through it before handover, with written notes for the tasks they will do most often.

Does AODA apply to our organisation?

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act sets accessibility requirements for web content that apply to many Ontario organisations, with the scope depending on the type of organisation and its size. We are developers, not lawyers, so we will not tell you your legal status — but we will build to WCAG-level practice regardless, because that is what makes the site usable by the people most nonprofits exist to serve. If your organisation needs a formal determination, that is a question for your own counsel.

Do we need a French version?

It depends on who you serve and where your funding comes from, not on a general rule. In the National Capital Region a meaningful share of the population lives in French, some funders and partners expect bilingual public-facing material, and organisations working across the river deal with it as a matter of course. What we would push back on is a half-translation: a French homepage bolted onto an English site, or a language switcher that drops the user back at the start, is often worse than being honestly unilingual.

Which donation platform should we use?

The honest answer is that it depends on your volume and whether you want tax receipting handled for you. CanadaHelps carries a platform fee and issues receipts automatically, which is worth a lot to a small organisation with no finance staff. A direct Stripe integration has lower per-transaction cost but leaves receipting with you. Zeffy charges nonprofits no platform fee and instead asks donors to tip the platform. We will connect whichever you choose and tell you plainly when the cheapest option is not the cheapest option once staff time is counted.

Will we lose our Google rankings if we rebuild?

Only if the rebuild is done carelessly. Nearly all of the protective work happens before launch: inventory every URL that exists today from the sitemap, analytics and Search Console, map each one to its replacement, and keep the redirects permanent — no chains and no blanket redirect to the homepage. Then crawl the new site after launch and check Search Console a week later rather than assuming it went fine.

Who owns the code, the domain and the accounts at the end?

Your organisation does. At handover the repository, the hosting, the domain registration and any third-party services are in the organisation's name, with your board as owner and us removed or downgraded to whatever access you want us to keep. This is worth asking every agency you speak to, and worth asking in those words. A site you cannot move is a site you are renting.

Is there a mandatory monthly fee?

No. There is no required retainer and no arrangement where the site stops working if you stop paying us. Most organisations keep us on for changes or a second phase because it is convenient, not because they are locked in. Your unavoidable ongoing costs are the domain and hosting, and for the kind of site most community groups need those should be small and predictable — a surprise renewal is a real problem for a group funded by memberships and sponsors.

Can you take over a site somebody else built?

Often, yes. The first step is a read-only look at what exists — the platform or codebase, the hosting, who actually owns the accounts, and what is genuinely broken. Sometimes the answer is a rebuild and sometimes it is a few days of fixes, and we would rather say the second when it is true. With volunteer-run groups the access question is frequently the hardest part, because nobody currently on the board knows where the domain is registered.

Do you work with organisations outside Ottawa?

Yes. We are based in Ottawa and a good share of the community work is local — Stittsville, Kanata, Barrhaven, Orléans, the Ottawa Valley, across the river in Gatineau — but the work is not geographically limited, and we have clients elsewhere in Canada. Being local matters most when a project needs in-person time with a board, or when local search is the point.

Not ready to talk to anyone yet?

Read the full nonprofit website guide and work out which of the three failures applies to you — donations, phone, or updatability. If none of them do, you probably do not need us, and that is a perfectly good outcome.