An ongoing development partnership with Canada's oldest national farm advocacy organization
National Farmers Union
| Website | www.nfu.ca |
|---|---|
| Domain | agriculture, family and small farm advocacy |
| Region | Canada |
| Main offices | Saskatoon, SK |
| Size | 20+ staff |
The National Farmers Union is Canada's only direct-membership national farm organization, advocating for family farmers and sustainable food systems for over 50 years. As their ongoing web development partner, I’ve extended and maintained nfu.ca, a large, membership-driven WordPress site, across a range of complex challenges: event management and regional filtering for a national audience, Gravity Forms-to-Stripe membership workflows, front-end DOM customization for The Events Calendar, and navigating infrastructure as legacy systems evolve.
The work is technical, but the stakes are organizational: keeping digital tools out of the way of the union's actual work.
The Work
The NFU's website is the operational front-end of a national union: a place where farmers renew their memberships, register for events from coast to coast, access policy publications, and submit community events for regional chapters. The systems underpinning it need to be reliable, maintainable by a small staff, and flexible enough to reflect how the union actually operates— regionally organized, politically active, and with a tighter budget.
My work with the NFU has evolved organically over time into something closer to an embedded development partnership than a project-based relationship. I keep the site running, I extend it when the union's needs grow, and I find a way to make requested solutions and enhancements solve problems without creating other ones.