We Stopped Bothering Our Developers

True, we once needed a developer just to fix a typo on our website. Not exactly smart content management.

We started as a tech NGO believing in open source. With two people on the team, a hard coded website was fine. Then we grew, and it stopped being fine.

Changing anything meant suddenly a ticket and a wait. A typo. A new photo. A new page. None of it was hard work. All of it needed someone who could code. Every hour a developer spent fixing a comma was an hour not spent on something only a developer can do.

What were we actually looking for?

A CMS is not a new idea. Picking the right one is the hard part, especially when you are not a typical customer.

We run in four languages. Some content comes straight from our platform and has to update in real time, like a change to the cash program. Some of it is content our users generate, like a fundraising campaign. Some pages sit behind a login, some are fully public, some are dynamic, some are static with dynamic pieces on top. And many of our readers in West Africa are on slow connections, so responsive images that load fast everywhere matter.

None of this is exotic on its own. Together, it ruled out a lot of options.

Why does trust matter as much as features?

We have all heard the story of software that is free until it is not. You build your workflow around it, then the terms change, or the price appears. No one wants to be locked in, and for us, being locked in means money that should fight poverty gets spent on IT instead.

So we were not just looking for a tool with features. We were looking for a partner who saw the impact of the work and wanted to support it directly.

What did we actually test?

We tried Contentful, Sanity, and Strapi before landing on Storyblok. Each is a solid CMS, used by companies far bigger than us. But our question was different: Could a tool built for enterprise marketing teams also work for a tech NGO powered by many volunteers? And would the company behind it want to help us achieve our mission?

After testing and comparing all four, we ultimately chose Storyblok.

What changed once we switched?

The visual editor made the biggest difference. A editors can now open a page, sees it exactly as a visitor would, and changes it right there. No ticket, no developer between an idea and the page going live.

Storyblok sponsored us a plan above the free tier, so we could scale without IT competing with our programs for budget. For us, that means more donations can go directly to people.

What would make it even better?

We are grateful for where we are, and we still have a wish list, because that is how you know a tool is actually being used.

Let me explain:

A/B testing: Testing how small changes to a page affect whether someone contributes beats guessing. More donations means more people supported.

Connecting Claude to the CMS: Anthropic supports us as an NGO with free credits we are not using fully. Wiring Claude into Storyblok through the API would let us put them to work directly, for example translating content into our four languages without exporting it first. That would free up time for the things only a person can do.