North Branch Collective

North Branch Collective is a coalition of small nonprofits working on watershed restoration across three provinces. Their old site was a scrapbook — every partner had added a page, nobody had taken one down, and the homepage read like a committee meeting. Volunteers bounced. Donors gave once and never came back.

We rebuilt the site around a single question: if someone lands here for twelve seconds, what do we want them to do? The answer changed by audience — volunteers wanted to see where the work is happening, donors wanted to see where the money goes, and journalists wanted a press kit that didn’t require three emails. So we built three clear paths from the homepage and let everything else be secondary.

Technically, the site runs on Astro with a lightweight CMS that their comms lead can update without calling us. Pages are statically generated for speed, images are served as AVIF with fallbacks, and the whole thing passes accessibility audit with room to spare. Page weight dropped from 4.2 MB to 380 KB on the homepage. Lighthouse scores went from a mixed bag to straight 98s.

The numbers that matter more: time-to-first-donation is down 40%, the volunteer sign-up form is getting completed instead of abandoned, and the board stopped asking whether the website is the problem. It isn’t, anymore.