01 / Fire, EMS and first responders
Free websites for fire and EMS nonprofits
Free websites for fire and EMS nonprofits, from the one sector where we have finished work to point at. First In Foundation, which supports Virginia's fire departments, is live and you can go and read it. We donate the design and the build. Hosting is $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50.
The offer
Donated build, $25 a month
- Build
- Donated. $0 upfront for design or development.
- Monthly
- $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50 a month. Hosting and SSL only.
- Domain
- Registered in the company's own account, under the company's name.
- Leaving
- Stop any time. You keep the files and can host them anywhere.
02 / Daily use
What a company site does
Not a brochure. Seven jobs, and the recruitment one pays for the other six.
- 01 Recruitment and the membership application. Somebody watches an engine go past, thinks about it for a week, then looks you up at 11pm on a phone. Either the requirements and the application are right there or the thought passes.
- 02 Incident and call updates. Residents want to know what the sirens on the main road were about. A short run post with a photo answers it, and it is also the only content that gives people a reason to come back.
- 03 Apparatus and stations. Unit numbers, year, make, what each piece carries, which station it runs from and the first-due area. Firefighters from other companies read this page. So do people deciding whether to join you or the company one town over.
- 04 Fund drives and the banquet. The annual letter, the boot drive, banquet or bingo details, memorial funds, and a donate button connected to the processor you already use. Not a new processor. Yours.
- 05 Duty schedule and standby coverage. Usually a link out to whatever system the roster already lives in. The site's job is to make that link findable and to say who to call when a shift is uncovered.
- 06 Community risk reduction signups. Smoke alarm installs, CPR and Stop the Bleed classes, car seat checks, address number signs, station tours. Every one of these is a request form that currently arrives as a voicemail.
- 07 Junior and cadet program. A separate page with the minimum age, what juniors are and are not permitted to do, and the parental consent step. Parents read this before their sixteen year old does.
03 / The content gap
What you have, what is missing
Fire companies are not short of material. Almost every company has more usable content than it has anywhere sensible to put it.
You almost certainly have
- 01 Photographs. Thousands of them. Apparatus, training nights, parades, scenes. Members shoot constantly. Most of it sits in a phone or a members-only album.
- 02 A Facebook page that is doing the work. It is where the calls, closures and fund drives get posted. It is also where the algorithm decides who sees them.
- 03 Run numbers. Call volume by year, response area, mutual aid agreements. Usually in a county report or an annual meeting handout.
- 04 Bylaws, an EIN and a determination letter. Everything the application asks for is already in the secretary's binder.
You are usually missing
- Gap Requirements stated before the form. Minimum age, distance from the station, driver's license, background check, physical. People will not fill in a form to find out whether they are allowed to.
- Gap The non-operational roles. Administrative, fundraising, driver only, fire police, auxiliary. A large share of the people who would say yes cannot do interior work and do not know there is anything else on offer.
- Gap Who the current officers are. The officers page is the single most reliably out of date page on a fire company website. Ours is built so one person can hand us a corrected list once a year.
- Gap A donation path that is not a Facebook fundraiser. Estates, businesses and grant officers want a page with the legal name, the EIN and a mailing address on it.
- Gap Text that works at arm's length. Small grey type over a photograph of a fire scene. Your donor base skews older than your roster does.
04 / The page that matters most
The recruitment page comes first
Every other page on a volunteer company's site is optional. This one is the reason to have a site at all. Staffing is the problem. The website is one of the few levers you own outright.
- Requirements
- Age, residency or response distance, license class, background check, physical. Stated in a list, above the form, in your actual numbers rather than ours.
- Time
- Duty nights per month, training hours, drill night. The honest figure. A recruit who quits in month four because nobody told them costs more than the one who never applied.
- Cost to them
- Gear, training and certification are almost always covered by the company. Say so in one sentence. Plenty of people assume they have to pay for a Firefighter I class.
- Roles
- Interior, exterior, driver operator, EMS, fire police, administrative, auxiliary, junior. Each one with the honest requirement attached.
- The form
- Works on a phone, one thumb, at night. No PDF to download, print, sign and bring to a meeting. That single change is usually the whole improvement.
- After submit
- Who receives it, who calls them, and how long that takes. Applications go stale in a week. Name the officer and give the interval.
- No experience
- If you train recruits from zero, that sentence belongs at the top of the page, not the bottom.
05 / The current site
The site a member built
A large share of volunteer companies run on a site a former member built somewhere between 2004 and 2012. It is not neglect. It was a favor, it worked, and then that person moved, or aged out, or died.
- 01 Nobody has the login. The hosting account is under a personal email that stopped being read years ago.
- 02 The domain renews to a card that no longer exists. This is the part that actually threatens you. A lapsed domain gets bought and pointed somewhere you would not choose.
- 03 No certificate. The browser tells every visitor the site is not secure before they read a word. Hosting and SSL are in the $25 a month.
- 04 It was built for a desktop. Which is a problem, because the recruit reading it is holding a phone.
Plain-English summary
We do not try to recover the old account. We build new and move the domain into an account the company controls.
If the domain cannot be recovered, we register a new one in the company's name. Either way it ends up yours, not ours and not a former member's.
06 / Work
A fire build you can check
Named with permission. This is the one sector on this site where the proof came before the program did.
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01
First In Foundation
Supports Virginia's fire departments.
07 / Questions
Questions from fire and EMS
Nobody has the login for our current site. Can you still help?
Yes. We build new rather than try to recover an account that belonged to somebody who left in 2011.
The one thing that does need sorting is the domain name. If it renews on a former member's card or a personal registrar account, we help you move it into an account owned by the company. If it cannot be recovered at all, we register a new one, in the company's name, in the company's account. That is where the domain stays.
Is a volunteer fire company eligible for this?
If the company holds a US 501(c) exemption, has an application pending with the IRS, or is fiscally sponsored, and the annual operating budget is under $1,000,000, yes.
A department that is a unit of local government is not a nonprofit and does not qualify on its own. Many of those have an affiliated volunteer association, auxiliary or foundation that does. That entity can apply. If you are unsure which one you are, apply and say so on the form.
Can our members post call updates and news themselves?
Tell us on the application that members will be posting and we will design for it.
What is not included is us doing the posting. The monthly covers hosting and SSL only, and any content edits you ask us to make are billed separately at the normal rate. Decide before the build who on the roster owns updates, because a news page with nothing newer than the year it launched is worse than no news page.
Do you build duty scheduling or a members-only area?
No. Custom web applications, databases and membership systems are outside the award, and so is email hosting.
If you already run scheduling, records or a members portal in another system, the site links to it. The public site and the operational system stay separate, which is also the safer arrangement.
08 / Apply
Free websites for fire companies
The design and the build are donated. Hosting is $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50 a month. You own the domain and the source files, and you can leave with both. Rolling, no deadline, a decision within 2 weeks of a complete application.
The phone and the email are support channels, not a sales line. Nobody will call you to close a deal.
Related sectors
- 01 Veterans services Overlapping volunteer base, and the same problem of a benefits page nobody can navigate.
- 02 Community health EMS-adjacent. Hours, eligibility and appointment paths carry the same weight there.
- 03 All eight sectors The list is not a limit. Most US 501(c) organizations under a $1,000,000 budget can apply, including those awaiting IRS determination.