OMEN.SERVICES

01 / Environmental conservation

Free websites for conservation nonprofits

We donate the design and the build. Hosting is $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50 a month. Built for a site that has to work on a phone, in a gravel parking lot, on one bar of signal.

  • Rolling, no deadline
  • Decision in 2 weeks
  • Live in 4 to 6 weeks
Apply for the grant Read the program detail

The mechanism

Donated build, $25 a month

The design and the build are donated. Hosting and SSL are $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50 a month, ongoing. Your domain is registered in your own account. You own the finished site and the source files, and you can stop and take them with you.

Decision
Within 2 weeks of a complete application.
Live
4 to 6 weeks once awarded and your content is in hand.
Not covered
Content edits, billed separately at the normal rate.

Check eligibility first

02 / How these sites get used

What a visitor does first

The public does not arrive through your home page. They arrive at a preserve name, mid-decision, usually already in the car.

  1. Searches the place

    Not the organization. The preserve, the trail, the boat landing, the meadow. Which means every site you steward needs its own page with its own name in the heading, not a shared list page with anchors. Search

  2. Checks the rules

    Open today. Dogs on leash or not at all. Bikes. Horses. Hunting season closures. Fee, permit, or neither. If the answer is not in the first screen, the answer becomes a guess, and a guess is how a gate gets left open. Rules

  3. Copies the address

    A trailhead address in plain selectable text, plus coordinates, because a lot of parking areas do not resolve by name in a mapping app and the pin lands on the wrong side of a ridge. Directions

  4. Opens the map

    On a phone, in a parking lot, on one bar. A static map image and a written route description load. An embedded tile server frequently does not, and a PDF that is the only copy of the map is worse than no map. Map

  5. Leaves the page

    Nobody reads the rules twice. Whatever they retained on the first pass is what they take onto the property, so the page is written to be read once, quickly, standing up. Then they go

03 / The page that matters most

The site access page

Not the about page. The page named after the place, which is the page the public actually searches for and the one that has to survive bad signal.

One page per property. Named for the property. It answers a fixed set of questions in a fixed order, so somebody who has used one of your site pages already knows where to look on the next.

  • 01 Parking and trailhead. Street address as text, coordinates as text, how many spaces, and whether the gate is locked outside posted hours.
  • 02 Hours and seasonal closures. Including the ones people forget: nesting season, burn days, hunting season on adjacent land.
  • 03 What is allowed. Dogs, bikes, horses, fishing, foraging, drones, groups over a certain size. Stated as permissions, not as a paragraph about stewardship values.
  • 04 Distance and difficulty. Loop length, elevation, surface, whether a wheelchair or a stroller gets anywhere, and where the terrain changes.
  • 05 The map. A static image with a written route description beside it, so the page still works when the image never finishes loading.
  • 06 Who to call. One number for a locked gate, a downed tree or a dumped load, answered by somebody who can act on it.

04 / Your content

Management plans need a home

Conservation organizations hold more technical material than almost any other kind of nonprofit, and usually have nowhere to put it.

Plans
Management plans, burn plans, restoration plans, invasive species treatment schedules.
Monitoring
Baseline documentation reports and annual easement monitoring summaries.
Survey data
Species lists, bird counts, water quality readings, vegetation plots.
Land record
Easement summaries, acquisition history, acreage by property, funding partners on each parcel.
Governance
Board minutes, annual reports, financial statements, accreditation status.

This material sits on a shared drive, gets emailed on request, and gets cited in grant applications that would be stronger if the document had a public address. The build gives it one page, one predictable naming pattern, and a plain description of every file so a reader can tell what it is before pulling 14 MB down a rural connection.

05 / Two things that age fast

Workdays and action alerts

Both are dated. Both are useless the day after. Both usually get deleted, which is the wrong answer.

Volunteer workdays

  • 01 Date, start time and how long it runs.
  • 02 Where to meet, which is rarely the trailhead.
  • 03 What to bring and what to wear. Long sleeves, boots, water, gloves or we supply them. This is the question your volunteer coordinator answers by email forty times a season.
  • 04 Minimum age, and the form a parent has to sign.
  • 05 Whether it runs in rain, and who to text if lost.

Advocacy and action alerts

  • 01 What the decision is, in one sentence.
  • 02 Who decides, and when the comment period closes.
  • 03 A link to the actual docket or hearing notice. Not a summary of it. People forwarding an alert to a neighbour need the primary source attached.
  • 04 What to say, and what not to copy word for word.
  • 05 What happened afterwards. Closed alerts move into a dated record rather than vanishing. It is the clearest evidence a funder will find that the advocacy program does something.

06 / Questions

Asked by land trusts and groups

Can you build an interactive trail map?

No. Custom web applications are outside the program.

What gets built is a static map image with a written description beside it, plain coordinates, a copyable trailhead address and a link to whatever mapping service you already publish to. That combination loads on one bar of signal. An embedded interactive map often does not.

Can the site host our management plans?

Yes, as files on a page, each with a plain description, a date and a file size.

It is a page, not a repository. There is no database, no search index and no access control, so anything you would not hand to a stranger should not go on it.

Can we take donations for a land purchase?

We connect the donation processor you already use: Stripe, Givebutter or PayPal. We do not supply the processor or the account, and we do not build a store.

A campaign page that explains the parcel and links to your processor is in scope.

Does our advocacy work affect eligibility?

No. 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(5) organizations all qualify.

The exclusion is partisan political campaign activity: the site may not be used for electioneering or candidate advocacy. Comment periods, agency rulemaking and issue campaigns are not that. The eligibility page states it in full.

07 / Related sectors

Volunteer scheduling and site logistics work the same way in these three. All eight sector pages.

Animal rescue

Adoption listings, foster applications, surrender info, urgent medical appeals.

Sector page

Food security

Pantry hours, eligibility, distribution locations, volunteer shift signups.

Sector page

Arts and culture

Event calendars, ticketing links, membership, exhibition and season archives.

Sector page

08 / Apply

Apply when you are ready

Rolling. No deadline. A decision within 2 weeks of a complete application. If the answer is no, you will hear that too.

Start the application Ask a question first

The phone and the email are support channels, not a sales line. Nobody will call you to close a deal.

Apply for the grant