GrowNYC

Fifty years of work, one overloaded website

GrowNYC began in 1970 as the Council on the Environment of New York City, founded in the spirit of the first Earth Day. In the half-century since, it has grown into one of the city’s most wide-reaching environmental nonprofits. GrowNYC operates the largest network of open-air farmers markets in the country, stewards more than 125 community gardens across the five boroughs, runs environmental education programs in schools, collects food scraps for compost, supports regional farmers through wholesale, and most recently opened a 60,000-square-foot regional food hub in the Bronx.

All of that sat behind a website that had been built in 2008, patched together since, and never quite caught up to the scale of the organization it was supposed to represent. It was static, dense, and not mobile-responsive. More than 60% of visitors were arriving on a phone. More than 60% bounced, and most never came back. The site’s single most-used feature, by a wide margin, was the map of Greenmarkets and Farmstands, which accounted for over 70% of traffic and needed to work flawlessly in real time. Donors, meanwhile, were struggling to understand the sheer breadth of what GrowNYC does and why it matters. The story was there. The site just wasn’t telling it.

Finding the story inside the programs

The first thing we did was listen. GrowNYC’s programs are interconnected in ways that aren’t obvious at first glance: the Greenmarkets support the farmers who supply the Food Hub that stocks the wholesale partners who feed the schools that host the gardens that grow the compost that feeds the markets. To map those relationships properly, we ran a series of discovery breakout groups with staff from each program area, so each team could talk us through what they actually do, who they serve, and where the old site was getting in their way. The conversations made clear how much context was missing from the previous experience, and how often programs had been treated as standalone islands when they are, in practice, one connected system.

The redesign is built around a clearer narrative spine: what GrowNYC believes, what GrowNYC does, and how New Yorkers can take part. Program pages now flow from impact to participation, so a visitor can land on Community Gardens, see what the program has built, and end up on a map of sites they can volunteer at that weekend.

Extending a brand into its digital home

GrowNYC came to us with a strong existing brand: a confident wordmark, a green that reads as both agricultural and unmistakably New York, and a visual language that holds together on a tote bag, a market sign, and the side of a truck. Our job was to extend that identity onto the web without flattening it. We translated the brand’s warmth into an interface that feels alive, with generous photography of the farmers, gardens, and schoolyards that make up GrowNYC’s world, typography that carries the organization’s voice without shouting, and a color system that stays rooted in GrowNYC’s established palette while introducing the flexibility a modern, multi-program site needs. The result looks like GrowNYC looks when you walk up to Union Square on a Saturday morning.

A Greenmarket finder that updates itself

One of the most important things the new website had to do was tell a New Yorker, at any given moment, which Greenmarkets were open and which farmers were there that day. That information already lived in FileMaker, where GrowNYC’s staff manage attendance, compliance, and internal reporting. Rather than build a second source of truth and ask staff to maintain two systems, we built a live integration between FileMaker and the website, layered on top of Google Maps.

The result is a finder that updates itself. When a farmer books their spot at a market, it shows up on the site. When a market closes early for weather or a producer swaps in at the last minute, visitors see it immediately. The map is filterable by borough, day, and what’s in season, and it works on the phone in your hand while you’re walking to the market. For the 70% of GrowNYC’s traffic that comes looking for a Greenmarket, the site now answers the question faster, more accurately, and without any manual updating from staff who already have enough to do.

Making it easy to give

A nonprofit website lives or dies on its ability to convert someone who cares into someone who gives. We built the donation experience on Blackbaud so that GrowNYC’s development team can work in tools they already know, and wove giving into the site in ways that feel like an invitation rather than an interruption: contextual calls-to-action on program pages, clean flows for corporate sponsors and foundation partners, and a donate experience that holds together on mobile, where most visitors are. The site now treats donors the way the organization treats its community partners, with specificity, with context, and with a clear picture of what their support makes possible.

Room to grow

The new grownyc.org is built for the next decade of the organization’s work. Capital projects can launch on their own microsites and thread back into the main narrative when the time is right. New programs can be added to the map without any custom development. Staff can update content without touching code, and translations can be layered in to keep pace with the communities GrowNYC serves. Every visitor, whether a donor in midtown, a farmer in the Hudson Valley, a teacher in Queens, or a parent looking for a Saturday market in the Bronx, now lands on a site that looks and feels like the organization behind it. GrowNYC has been building a healthier, more sustainable New York for more than fifty years. The website finally tells that story.