Website
Rise Calgary runs the largest tax clinic in the city, and for years the clients who needed it most had to get past a website to find it. That was the problem worth solving, and the budget for solving it was fixed, based on a grant.
Rise Calgary formed in 2017, when changes to funding forced twelve community resource centres to restructure and three of them merged. The organization supports Calgarians living on low incomes through three progressive stages of service: stabilization, which covers immediate needs like tax help and food access; mobility, which covers income and housing security; and empowerment, which helps people take control of what comes next. A team of nineteen, including contractors, serves roughly two thousand new clients each year.
We began working with Rise in October 2025 and launched their new website the following June. The organization had a clear picture of its own work, a detailed annual impact report, and a live capital campaign to fund a permanent home. What it did not have was a website that could carry any of it.
The existing site was built in Wix and maintained by two staff members splitting the job between other duties. Their assessment of it was blunt and fair: the editing interface was too granular to work in quickly, keeping desktop and mobile consistent was a constant fight, and updates took longer than the team could afford. The site was not failing for lack of care. It was failing because the tool asked more of them than their week allowed.
That framed the whole project. Whatever we built had to be genuinely maintainable by people whose actual job is social work, and it had to hold up against a fixed budget. We kept the scope deliberately lean, starting from three content models rather than a large library of page types, and spent the savings on the things Rise would touch every week.
Details
- Client
- Rise Calgary
- Year
- 2026
- Work
- Web design, Web development, Content management systems, Content modelling
