About Blue Hills Digital

Blue Hills Digital is a solo-consultancy through which I — Ed Harris — get to help mission-driven clients meet their goals through effective digital strategy. The business started as a side project back in 2012, focused solely on website builds. Since then, Blue Hills Digital has evolved into a broader consultancy supporting nonprofit and mission-driven clients not only with website design and optimization but also with digital marketing strategy, audience research, search engine optimization, email marketing, and content strategy.

About Ed Harris

I’m Ed Harris, and I’m the owner and principal consultant at Blue Hills Digital. I work primarily with nonprofit organizations and other mission-driven or social impact clients. If you’re a leader or communications professional in a mission-driven org and feel overwhelmed by a thousand competing digital marketing priorities, I might be able to help.

My goal is to make sure your website, and all the tools connected to it, work for your organization. Like, really work. I want your website to be highly visible in search results. I want your website to attract relevant visitors, and to provide an enjoyable, accessible, informative user experience. I want your website to help those users along their journey with your organization (whether that means making a donation, joining an email list, taking action, signing up to volunteer, downloading resources … you get the idea).

Here are a few examples of the type of support I can provide:

• Migrating an existing website to a new platform to support growth or to make management easier
• Extending an existing website to improve functionality or better integrate with other organizational systems
• Providing insight into website performance and SEO through customized analytics and reporting
• Developing a digital communications and marketing strategy to connect audiences with actions and conversions across all digital communication channels

Here a non-exhaustive list of technologies and platforms I frequently work with:

My journey with website development and working for social change started over twenty years ago. I spent several years in higher education, researching the impact of narratives and place-based stories on social change in the food security and agricultural sustainability sectors. I earned my PhD in Human Geography in 2013 from Clark University in Worcester, MA, following time at the Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh in the UK. Throughout this period, I also learned website development, and realized effective communications are critically important to social change. In an increasingly digital world, organizations and movements have digital homes – websites – around which all other communications and much community engagement revolve.

Following my time in higher education, I worked in-house for several nonprofit organizations managing website content and leading communications and marketing efforts. This in-house experience culminated in marketing and communications roles for national nonprofit organizations in the education, civil rights, and advocacy spaces. In these roles, I was the client in the client/consultant relationship, an experience I find immensely valuable now that these roles are reversed and I work as a consultant-partner with clients.

I am based in Portland, OR and split my time between the Pacific NW and Vermont. I’m originally from the UK — you’ll hear the accent if we talk.

For current writing and commentary, check the Articles and Guides section on the Blue Hills Digital website (I write all content there myself) or connect with me on LinkedIn.