The Recycling Partnership

The Recycling Partnership is a national nonprofit working on the unglamorous side of recycling. The infrastructure, the contamination problems, the community programs, the policy work, and the brand partnerships that actually change what gets recycled and how. Their website is where program partners find resources, where municipalities download kits, where stakeholders track outcomes, and where the team publishes the work that runs the rest of the operation.

They came to us in 2018. The site was growing faster than the internal team had bandwidth to manage. New campaigns. New center pages. Custom forms tied to stakeholder programs. PDF builders and downloadable kits that partner organizations depended on day to day. What they needed was a long-term web partner who would learn the site well enough to handle the small stuff without re-explaining it, stay available when something had to ship fast, and stick around long enough to see things through.

Eight years in, here is what the relationship looks like:

• A site that has stayed online and useful through campaign launches, board changes, partner rollouts, and the press cycles that come with national press coverage.
• Custom integrations and forms that stakeholders use every week. Kits, sign-ups, anti-contamination tools, campaign asset downloads.
• A short path when something has to happen fast. The team sends the message, we pick it up, the work moves.
• Working knowledge of a site that has changed substantially over eight years, including code we did not write that we have taken over, documented, and kept running.
• A scoped rebuild proposal in front of them now, built from everything we have learned about how the team actually works.

What 500+Tickets Across Eight Years Looks Like

The cadence has shifted in line with the organization.

From 2018 through 2020, the work was moderate and steady. New page templates, custom forms, a Google Ads tag installation, early stakeholder tools. Both sides were learning the shape of the relationship.

From 2021 through 2023, the volume climbed. June 2023 had 21 tickets on its own. New center pages, a custom downloads plugin, the Recycling 101 redesign with a Quiq chatbot, board pages, an Issuu integration for digital publications. The organization grew. The site grew with it.

Since 2024, the pace has settled. Fewer tickets per month, more deliberate work, the same fast response when the calendar demands it.

Twenty-two of the tickets across that history have “TIMELY:” in the subject line. Eighteen have run at Critical priority. When a stakeholder-facing tool goes down or a campaign asset has to be live by end of day, that is the kind of work that has tended to land in our inbox.

The One That Took Three Weeks

January 2023. The custom Campaign and PDF Builder behind the downloadable kits, social media assets, anti-contamination resources, and DIY signage went quiet. Form submissions had stopped reporting since late November and nobody noticed until a stakeholder flagged it. Heath Nettles, the team’s Director of Marketing and Communications, brought it to us with a line we kept in our heads while we worked:

“These resources are critical for our stakeholders. It would be like a bank whose ATMs were down.”

The root cause was not what we expected. The PDF Builder had been built years earlier by a previous developer on a Gravity Forms PDF extension with custom modifications that had drifted out of sync with the underlying plugin. We worked it as Critical, put a client-approved “under maintenance” message in place so partners had transparency in the meantime, opened a ticket with the third-party plugin vendor, and shipped a working fix in early February.

Three weeks is not a fast win. The reason this one is worth telling is the part underneath. The team trusted us to manage a high-stakes failure in code we did not own, and we kept the communication honest the whole way through.

A Tight Deadline and a Chatbot

April 2022. The team needed the Recycling 101 page redesigned and a Quiq chatbot rolled out across both recyclingpartnership.org and a sister site, communitiesforrecycling.org. Target go-live in about ten days.

The ticket ran 73 messages. Real-time back-and-forth on video block versus hero image. A same-night music licensing video swap. Chat dialog UX tuning. A manual staging-to-production migration because a full-site push was not safe with other work in flight. Their response through the build: “OK. Awesome. Perfect. Glad to hear. THANK YOU!”

That is the other side of the relationship. Lower stakes per ticket, higher velocity, the kind of work that only goes well when both teams already know how each other operates.

→ Looking for a long-term web partner who learns your site, stays available when it matters, and grows with the organization? Let’s talk about our partnership plans.