We help nonprofits thrive on the web, so they can improve the world.

A Cold Morning

BFC Digital was born at a kitchen table in a studio apartment.

Outside, it was one of those miserable mornings in the deep winter of New York City, when the sky looks like it wants to snow but what comes down instead is icy, stinging rain that gets under your scarf and turns the part of the sidewalk that slopes down into the street into a muddy slush puddle that even the pigeons know to avoid.

But inside the apartment, the radiator was banging and hissing, which meant warmth. There was coffee. And in the email inbox of our founder, Ben Freda, was a message from a distant connection who ran a nonprofit called Leadership for Healthy Communities: Can you update our website? It’s a Joomla site. We can pay. How’s $45 an hour?

Origins

Ben raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t a web developer by training, although he’d taken a few coding classes at Stanford University a decade earlier. After graduating, he’d caught whatever bug had been going around the Silicon Valley campus at the time and spent a year building a doomed website startup company. He brought enthusiasm and optimistic naiveté to the venture; his partner, another 21-year-old who’d only recently begun to shave, brought a passion for automobile repair. Together, they built the web’s first comparison shopping engine (get it?) for auto parts. In the year before the company went utterly and predictably belly-up, Ben learned how to tell an oil filter from an alternator and, more consequentially, PHP from javascript from HTML.

Then had come law school in New York, where he focused on human rights, and then a brief career as an attorney at the kind of law firm they make movies about, in which young people in expensive suits get yelled at over mahogany conference tables by older people in even more expensive suits. It was on a Saturday morning during this period when Ben’s email pinged and he opened a web browser and, using the username and password the colleague (then client) had sent, logged into the back-end of a nonprofit website.

Growing into BFC Digital

What started as a side hustle began to grow as word spread, and Ben’s venture quickly became a full-time job. In 2010, the company incorporated as Ben Freda Consulting, Inc. and hired its second employee. As more clients arrived, the work expanded to other technologies beyond Joomla. The company’s first Drupal project was a Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 upgrade for a (now defunct) nonprofit called MobileActive, which helped protestors in Iran’s green revolution evade surveillance by the country’s secret police. The first WordPress project soon followed: a new site for the Marguerite Casey Foundation, with whom we’ve worked ever since. We hired a third employee in 2012. From there, more challenges and different solutions: mobile responsiveness, CRM integrations, complicated Web Apps, and more.

Learning Professional Support and Construction

As we worked, we learned — about nonprofits, about their challenges, and about the best solutions to those challenges. We focused on developing solid processes to make success predictable, and remove some of the stress that many clients seemed to vibrate with when they approached the company. Our first process was what we call the “robot chain” — a way of providing sites with security and reliability while retaining the ability to apply updates and make continuous improvements to them. And under the leadership of our award-winning UX designer Chris Antonelle, our fourth hire, we developed a solid process for how to strategize, design, and build new websites from the ground up that help our clients change the world.

Why We Do What We Do

After more than a decade of experience, we have a solid handle on who we are — and who we aren’t.

We treat people like humans, and expect the same from them. We abhor the concept of “support tickets,” and prefer good conversations over email or phone. We are solution-impartial, meaning that we don’t “prefer” WordPress over Drupal or Salesforce over Blackbaud — instead, we “prefer” whichever solution will work best for the particular challenge at hand.

Most importantly, we are inspired by our clients and want to, where we can, help them as they improve the world.