Nonprofit & civic tech

Three of the systems I've shipped are civic or nonprofit work. Volunteer Clinton County is a platform I co-founded where local organizations post opportunities, events, donation needs, and board openings, and residents sign up, log hours, and message the org directly. The Rotary Club of Downtown Lock Haven site was pro bono: officers run content from a custom dashboard, members sign in with single-use magic links, and events take RSVPs with capacity and deadline controls. GrantCue is a multi-tenant grant platform; nonprofits can apply for a free account, subject to approval, and the catalog rebuilds itself on a schedule from thirteen public sources.

Nonprofit budgets are a real constraint, so I scope to them. Work is fixed-scope by project, priced from what the first release has to do. What pushes a nonprofit number up is almost always a second user role, or a legacy system somebody has to be pulled out of. What brings it down is shipping a narrow first release and letting the rest wait for the next budget year. Nothing gets built before that number is in writing, and it moves only if you change what you asked for.

The handoff matters more here than at a company with an IT department. Board members rotate and staff turn over. Content lives behind an editor a volunteer can use, roles change from an admin screen instead of a config file, and the documentation covers what an incoming officer needs: who has access, and how to run the thing without calling me.

Where clearances and sensitive records are involved, the rules belong in the database. On Volunteer Clinton County, volunteers upload Pennsylvania background-check and clearance documents into a private storage bucket; files are never public, and an organization only receives a short-lived signed URL after a dedicated function checks roster discoverability, share opt-in, and conversation status. Service hours are verified through a locked, audited routine.

What you get

• Public-facing site for events, projects, and donation paths, with content officers edit themselves
• Membership site with a member directory, gated document downloads, and event RSVPs
• Volunteer management: opportunity listings, signups, waitlists that promote automatically, hour logging, and org-side verification
• Role-based access with owner, manager, poster, and viewer tiers, plus passwordless or invite-only sign-in
• Private storage for clearances, minutes, and bylaws, released through short-lived signed URLs
• Spam-protected forms, per-action rate limiting, and outbound email with bounce and complaint tracking
• Structured data, a dynamic sitemap, and per-page social cards generated from the live content
• Handoff: admin walkthrough, written documentation, and hosting and service accounts in your organization's name

Shipped work behind this

• Volunteer Clinton County — A civic platform I co-founded and developed, where local organizations post volunteer opportunities, events, and donation drives and residents sign up and log hours — on a hardened, security-first data model.
• Rotary Club of Downtown Lock Haven — A pro bono CMS-backed membership site I developed for the club — not a brochure. Officers manage content from a custom dashboard; members get gated downloads and event RSVPs; every public form is spam-protected.
• GrantCue — A multi-tenant platform that ingests the federal Grants.gov catalog plus eleven state portals on a schedule, then layers AI discovery, fit-scoring, and proposal drafting over a full team pipeline.