About Us — Digital Marketing Built for Nonprofits
We failed at eCommerce first. Now we help nonprofits get found.
Twenty years of digital marketing experience, hard-earned from our own mistakes, is now put to work helping community organizations reach the people who need them.
Digital Marketing Built for Nonprofits
That focus isn’t an afterthought — it’s personal. Mike Doherty, who leads our nonprofit work, serves as Chief Experience Officer at Greening Projects, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming underutilized urban spaces into vibrant green areas that benefit communities and the environment. Mike oversees the end-to-end experience of residents, volunteers, municipal partners, and donors involved in the organization’s green space conversion projects — the same relationships every nonprofit marketing plan ultimately has to serve.
That day-to-day view from inside a nonprofit, not just alongside one, shapes how we approach every client’s strategy: what a board actually wants reported, what a volunteer coordinator actually needs from a website, what a donor actually clicks on.
Mike Doherty
Chief Experience Officer
Chief Experience Officer at Greening Projects. Brings a firsthand view of board meetings, volunteer coordination, and donor relationships into every client engagement — not a consultant’s outside guess at what nonprofits need.
We’re a small, hands-on team — when you work with us, you work directly with the people who build the strategy, not an account manager.
Our backstory — failed eCommerce entrepreneurs
We built our first store on Yahoo and generated a fair amount of traffic through a Yahoo group we grew from scratch. Then one day, we broke a rule we didn’t know existed, the group vanished, and with it, our only real traffic source. That experience taught us our first Golden Rule:
Don’t build on rented land.
It’s a lesson that matters just as much for a nonprofit relying on a single social platform to reach donors as it did for our failing store.
We moved to blogging on TypePad and built our store by hand in HTML. We had control, but the upkeep was brutal. As we grew, we experimented with social media, eBay, Amazon, trade shows, and offline events. Some worked. A lot didn’t. Then, in 2008, the bottom fell out — sales dried up overnight in an economy that no longer had room for what we were selling. We held on longer than we should have. Eventually, we closed the doors and started building sites for other people to make ends meet.
Never stopped learning
We kept experimenting across platforms — Yahoo, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Typo3, Joomla — until two rose to the top: WordPress and Shopify. WordPress lets us build sites that are intuitive, low-maintenance, and flexible enough for organizations without a dedicated tech team. Shopify gave us a reliable, easy-to-manage platform for online stores and donation pages alike.
Along the way, we learned that not everyone experiences the web the same way. Many people find typical websites hard to use, so we built accessibility into everything from that point forward — a principle that matters enormously for organizations serving diverse, often underserved communities. We also spent time in Europe, where GDPR came into effect while we were there, and learned firsthand how to build privacy and compliance into a website from the ground up — a skill that transfers directly to nonprofits handling sensitive donor and client data.
Finding our niche in mission-driven work
While working in Berlin, we focused on a niche for the first time: digital health. We partnered with accelerators like Startup Bootcamp and Barcelona Health Hub, learned the language of value-based care and digital therapeutics, and leveraged our venture capital background to help early-stage health organizations sharpen their pitch decks, websites, and messaging.
That same period led us into cannabis policy work in Germany, supporting early-stage organizations with content, weekly industry updates, and community-building — reinforcing a lesson we now apply to every client: niche expertise and consistent visibility matter more than volume.
Finding our way home
After ten years abroad, we returned to San Francisco. With the rise of Generative AI, earning visibility through organic search has become harder, and paid ads keep getting more expensive — a squeeze that hits mission-driven organizations with lean budgets the hardest. So we’ve focused on helping our clients build omnichannel visibility across community groups, video, voice, and podcasting, as well as a strong hyperlocal presence through Google Business Profiles, directories, community events, and referral marketing.
This is where our work today is centered: helping nonprofits, community programs, and local service organizations become the trusted, first-found resource in their neighborhood — whether that neighborhood is searching for a food pantry, a green space to volunteer at, or a program for their kids.
How We Work
Build, Grow, Convert
Most nonprofits don’t need a total marketing overhaul — they need a clear next step. BGC meets your organization wherever it currently stands.
Build
A fast, accessible website and an optimized Google Business Profile — the basic infrastructure that lets your community find you at all.
Grow
Scale visibility across the channels your audience actually uses — local search, directories, video, voice, and podcasting.
Convert
Turn visibility into volunteer sign-ups, service inquiries, and donor conversions — measured against what your board actually cares about.
Data and Metrics
We believe good intentions deserve good measurement. We run A/B tests and build KPIs around what actually matters for mission-driven growth — service inquiries, volunteer sign-ups, donor conversions, retention, and the outcomes our clients report to their boards and funders.
With over twenty years of experience, including our own share of hard lessons, we help our clients build their digital presence, grow community awareness and trust, and ultimately convert searches and supporters into real impact.
You can usually find us in the dog park when we’re not building something.
See how far your visibility actually reaches
We’ll run a free 15-minute audit and show you exactly where your organization shows up — or doesn’t — in the searches your community runs every day.