We help nonprofits thrive on the web, so they can improve the world.
Let Us Help
Over the last decade, we have helped hundreds of organizations thrive on the web. With our help, they've designed huge new sites, squashed thousands of bugs, created custom web applications, and more. How can we help you?
Tailored
Design
Web Design & Branding
Led by our Webby-nominated Creative Director, our strategy and design process can help you with a logo, website design, style guide, infographics, image treatments, or social avatars.
Expert
Development
Front and Back-End
We create and test code so it's semantic, SEO-ready, accessible to at least WCAG level AA, and mobile-responsive for devices of any width. Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla are our preferred backend solutions.
Ongoing
Support
Dedicated Team
We don't do "support tickets." Instead, connect with your own dev team who help you bug fix, add landing pages, create new functionality, and strategize future plans.
More Services We provide
Email Newsletters
Keep your audience updated with branded udpates.
Membership Portals
Create a log-in-only section of your site for exclusive content.
Hosting Management
Deftly manage hosting and proactively respond to issues.
CRM Integrations
Get your site talking to Salesforce, DonorPerfect, Soapbox Engage, or other CRMs.
Mobile Responsiveness
Give your users an excellent experience, no matter their device.
Web Apps
Create custom web applications.
Accessibility
Ensure accessibility to at least level AA.
Site Speed
Improve site loading time.
Infographics
Communicate complex data visually.
Strategy
Define and achieve your organization's objectives.
Site Reliability
Ensure your assets are always available.
Logos & Branding
Develop a strong visual identity.
Analytics
Measure and improve website performance.
Wordpress
A widely used and user-friendly CMS that allows for easy content management.
Technical Planning
Predict and plan for your upcoming technology needs.
CMS Updates
Keep your website content management system up-to-date.
Drupal
An open-source CMS that is known for its scalability and flexibility.
Social Media Integration
Integrate website with social media channels.
E-Commerce
Sell products, services, or event tickets online.
Online Donations
Help your users contribute to your mission.
Joomla
A popular open-source CMS that offers a wide range of features and extensions.
We take pride in our culture of empathy, friendliness, accountability and fairness. It influences the processes we use, how we treat and communicate with colleagues and clients, and how we support our clients’ missions.
Sample Solutions
The situations nonprofits face on the web are wide-ranging, and the solutions can be opaque. We have processes and solutions that help nonprofits overcome their web challenges.
“Our mission has changed dramatically over the last few years. We need to redesign the website.”
No problem. We have a documented, thorough process for designing and building new sites. We'll help you conduct a thorough analysis of the new mission and goals, create wireframes to capture user flow and functionality, generate and iterate on design mockups until we have the perfect design, and then build on a stable, user-friendly CMS to set you up for future success.
“Our host emailed and said our site will be taken down on Monday unless we update PHP. What do we do?”
We’ve got you covered. Our first step would be to check if there are any backups available, and if there are, restore the website from the most recent backup on a different server. If there are no backups available, it is important to quickly identify the reason why the website is being taken down, and take steps to address the issue. This could include working with the hosting provider to resolve the problem or migrating the website to a new hosting provider.
“The last web developer left our project half-done, and we have to launch next month — but it's full of bugs! Help!”
It happens! First, let’s open up the lines of communication and gather all of the necessary information and resources to finish the project. We would quickly assess the current state of the project, identify and fix the most critical bugs, then work to ensure that the rest of the project looks and works the way you intend.
Some of our clients
Our Story
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.
Our Team
Chris Antonelle
Creative Director
Chris is the creative director at BFC. With over 15 years of experience designing and implementing front-end technology, Chris takes on every project with a contagious passion and an unflinching trust in the technology design process to solve real problems. He’s responsible for frontend development and any additional design needs that arise.
Shayna Reed
Director of Support
With over seven years of data architecture and project planning experience, Shayna thrives when collaborating with clients and BFC team members to build custom web solutions. She’s responsible for overseeing BFC Support and implementing fixes and custom solutions for her portfolio of websites. A full stack web developer, Shayna provides exceptional Drupal and WordPress support for clients ranging from small nonprofits to national television leaders.
Ben Freda
Founder & Web Developer
Ben has more 20 years of experience in web technology. After studying computer science at Stanford University and managing a website startup, he went to Columbia Law School and focused on human rights. In 2010 he left the legal world to start BFC, a boutique web development shop to focus on open-source web solutions for non-profit organizations. He’s responsible for strategy, planning, CMS configuration, and back-end development.
Ben Reinhardt
Web Developer
Ben manages a portfolio of Drupal websites for large nonprofit organizations, specializing in functionality enhancements, content management strategies, and website accessibility. With over a decade of customer support experience, Ben excels at educating clients about the inner workings of their sites. He strives to provide easy-to-use solutions for every problem and prides himself on maintaining consistent, friendly communication throughout any project.
Perry Nguyen
Web Developer
Perry is a web developer at BFC who manages our maintenance workflow, improves website stability, and ensures compatibility during updates. He has five years of experience in PHP, mySQL, and other back-end frameworks. He expertly develops custom solutions to knotty problems for WordPress and Drupal websites.
Michael Mehler, VERA Institute of Justice