From advocacy to agency

Using digital storytelling to drive environmental action

Ryan Vandecasteyen’s path to co-founding Van City Studios began not in a boardroom but on the wild coast of British Columbia, paddling a kayak through pristine waters threatened by oil pipelines.

Before launching Van City Studios, Ryan studied geography at the University of British Columbia, focusing on how human systems interact with the natural world. But for him, it was a personal project during his university years that clarified how digital storytelling and advocacy could drive real impact. When a $5.5 billion bitumen pipeline project threatened the north coast of British Columbia, Ryan and two friends kayaked the entire BC coastline, creating the The Pipedreams Project documentary to help mobilize public opposition. 

That project sharpened Ryan’s interest in how storytelling can move people to act. "I always had an interest in online advocacy and creating change in the world," Vandecasteyen reflects.

After graduating, he also worked with UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership, which studies how policy and socioeconomic conditions influence childhood development. That experience deepened his understanding of how policy shapes lives—and how advocacy must be paired with strategic communication to create change. 

Around the same time, James Firth, also a Van City Studios co-founder, was pursuing a degree in computer science and honing his strengths in problem-solving, systems thinking, and scalable technical architecture. Where Ryan gravitated toward strategy, policy, and storytelling, James brought deep technical fluency and a knack for building tools that work reliably at scale.

When Ryan and James joined forces to build Van City Studios, their complementary backgrounds—strategic advocacy and technical systems design—became foundational to the agency’s model. Rather than simply building websites, they set out to build digital infrastructure that could mobilize people and drive measurable outcomes for mission-driven organizations.

Answering the digital challenges mission-driven organizations face with experience and strategy

Nonprofits, unions, and advocacy groups navigate a unique set of challenges. They fight for urgent causes, but often lack the right technical infrastructure to move quickly when opportunities arise. They must mobilize thousands of supporters, coordinate volunteers across entire countries, run bilingual or multilingual campaigns, and report results—all often with limited staff and budgets.

Traditional digital agencies might deliver a website and then step away. From its inception, Van City Studios recognized that many mission-driven organizations don’t just need a website — they need a partner to help turn their passion and expertise into an engagement strategy, infrastructure, and supporter-facing content that can scale. 

Scaling campaigns with limited staff and budgets

Many come to Van City Studios for web design and development support, but stay for the strategic partnership. “At the core of what we do is to help the people we work with conceptualize and execute digital strategies to create change in the world,” Vandecasteyen explains. “Our clients often have strong ideas and deep issue expertise—we help translate that into supporter-facing experiences that, with the right tools and infrastructure, can drive engagement at scale.”

A small team built for deep partnerships and real results

In order to be able to fully support their clients, Van City Studios created a distinctive niche by choosing depth over volume. They partner only with organizations aligned with their values, and often operate as an extension of their clients’ teams.

“Every organization is structured differently, so we play a bit of a different role with each client,” Firth says. "And because we're a small team, we often wear multiple hats."

This flexibility allows the Van City Studios team to act as day-to-day operations partners, rapid-response strategists, or long-term infrastructure and capacity builders, depending on the organization’s needs.

Why deep understanding leads to stronger outcomes

What differentiates Van City Studios is the time they invest in understanding the underlying problems their clients are working to address. "We go beyond the surface to understand not just the work, but the deeper-rooted issues our clients aim to solve in the world—and why it matters,” Vandecasteyen notes. “That depth of understanding leads to stronger, more effective outcomes.”

This approach has earned them recognition as one of NationBuilder's top-rated agencies, with a client roster that includes some of the world’s most impactful organizations working for social and environmental change.

Case studies

Conservation Lands Foundation: Launching a national advocacy campaign with huge impact

When a U.S. Senate bill threatened to weaken land conservation protections across 11 western states, Conservation Lands Foundation (CLF) needed a rapid-response national advocacy campaign to fight it.

Having partnered with Van City Studios for several years—first to redesign their NationBuilder-powered website, then as a day-to-day operational partner—the team had developed a deep understanding of CLF’s mission and approach. That level of partnership meant they could move immediately and effectively. Using NationBuilder and New/Mode, they built a complete engagement funnel that allowed supporters to email their elected officials in opposition to the bill, share the campaign, and donate—all within a few clicks.

Then, all of their work, and a good dose of luck, combined to create something magical: Billie Eilish shared the campaign with her over 10 million Instagram followers, sending it viral.

The results were transformative:

• Nearly tripled CLF’s supporter base
  

• More than 14,000 organic social shares
  

• 155 first-time donors from people who had never heard of CLF
  

• Welcome email automation with open rates over 55%

The surge of public pressure contributed to key portions of the bill being removed.

"It really showed that investments in the right digital infrastructure that can scale at a moment's notice—and the expertise to deploy it effectively—are essential,” Firth reflects.

Mobilize Recovery: Powering a nationwide recovery movement

Some organizations need rapid response. Others require sustained infrastructure that can support community organizing at scale. Mobilize Recovery needed both.

Their third annual Day of Service—a network of community-driven events uniting people in recovery and their allies to create lasting change—expanded into a two-month, nationwide effort in 2025. They needed a platform that allowed people across the United States to create, promote, and manage their own community service events while still connecting back to the national movement.

Van City Studios creatively built a flexible system around NationBuilder’s user-submitted events feature. The team developed a custom website that enabled organizers to publish events that automatically populated an interactive map powered by NationBuilder and Mapbox. They launched toolkits and resources, creating a streamlined model for community-led action.

Beyond Day of Service, this digital infrastructure enabled additional national initiatives throughout 2025, including multi-state tours, advocacy efforts, and distributed volunteer engagement. The combined results demonstrate the scale of Mobilize Recovery’s national efforts—work Van City Studios has been proud to help power through ongoing partnership, strategic guidance, infrastructure development, and technical support:

• 781 community-led Day of Service events

• Nevada’s largest-ever volunteer event, with 540 volunteers distributing 10,000 Naloxone kits

• 6,500 participants in Mobilize Recovery’s Campus Surge tour, a series of free, in-person events across US college campuses focused on empowering students by offering leadership training in recovery advocacy and by providing life-saving mental health resources across 15 states

• 1.9 million emails to 64,000 recipients

• 109,000 text messages

• 126,000 website visits from 100,000 unique visitors

• 3,300 new signups

• 5,700 event RSVPs

• 3,300 advocacy messages to elected officials using ActionButton

Mobilize Recovery was formally recognized for its work, winning seven Anthem Awards in 2025, including Small Nonprofit of the Year.

"They are a small nonprofit organization that really punches above their weight," Vandecasteyen says. “The team itself is just an amazing group of individuals that are incredibly motivated and determined to create change in their communities. We’re proud to be part of that work.”

Unifor: Scaling union organizing and engagement across Canada

In 2025 alone, Unifor navigated engaging with its members through multiple elections at both the federal and provincial levels. For the Federal and Ontario provincial elections, Van City Studios helped build member-focused “Get Out The Vote” websites with bilingual messaging in French and English, supported canvassing efforts using a combination of NationBuilder and eCanvasser, and coordinated multi-week email programs reaching hundreds of thousands of union members from coast to coast to coast.

The Van City Studios team also helped Unifor execute policy-focused campaigns such as Protect Canadian Jobs, supported digital engagement with key demographic groups within the union, and helped manage systems for Unifor’s education department to manage online course enrollment.

In addition to using NationBuilder to communicate and engage with their members, they also use it to recruit, organize, and stay connected with those interested in unionizing their workplace. Van City Studios has helped Unifor launch organizing campaigns across multiple sectors, including the warehouse sector, the aviation sector, and the auto parts sector.

Unifor’s work with Van City Studios highlights a central Van City Studios principle: Understand the organization’s mission so that they can build flexible infrastructure that can serve many teams and many goals.

Innovating with NationBuilder to meet unique needs

Van City Studios is known for pushing NationBuilder’s native tools to do more. A recent project with Fix City Hall demonstrates this creativity.

The organization needed to collect petition signatures that met strict legislative requirements. Electronic signatures were allowed, but the signatures needed to be real.

"We were able to kind of reimagine NationBuilder petition pages and the tools that are available there to allow people to sign a petition with an actual signature," Vandecastyen explains.

No external plugins were required. It was a custom solution built entirely within NationBuilder.

And Van City Studios’ partnership with NationBuilder extends beyond client work.

They created the original Raise theme in 2020 and updated it again in 2025. Raise is now the default NationBuilder theme for new sites, featuring multilingual support, improved accessibility, and commonly requested features built on Bootstrap 4.

Leading education across the community

Vandecasteyen also co-hosted “Asks that convert” in NationBuilder’s “Ask, Act, Repeat” webinar series, a webinar focused on using your website and ActionButton to move supporters up the ladder of engagement and increase conversions. 

His expertise in tailoring the supporter journey was on full display, showcasing how to move supporters from curious to committed, highlighting the close relationship NationBuilder has with Van City Studios. It remains one of the most referenced sessions in the webinar series.

The secret to long-term impact

Van City Studios’ story begins with a simple insight: meaningful change starts small—through deliberate action, compelling storytelling, and community. That early lesson, rooted in Ryan Vandecasteyen’s environmental advocacy work and strengthened through co-founder James Firth’s technical problem-solving approach, became the foundation for the agency the two would later build together.

Today, that principle guides the entire Van City Studios team. Whether launching national rapid-response campaigns, empowering volunteers to lead hundreds of distributed events, or helping unions mobilize members across an entire country, the agency has seen how thoughtful strategy paired with the right digital systems can transform individual actions into collective impact.

For mission-driven organizations, the lesson is clear: change doesn’t come from one viral moment or a single campaign (though it doesn’t hurt). It comes from building strong connections, investing in systems that can grow, and empowering supporters to act again and again. Van City Studios turns that philosophy into measurable outcomes, proving that when thoughtful actions meet strong relationships, extraordinary results are possible.

Ready to turn your digital strategy into real-world impact? Learn more about partnering with Van City Studios nationbuilder.partners/vancitystudios or explore their work at vancitystudios.com.

Want to become a NationBuilder partner? Learn more at https://www.nationbuilder.partners.