Embroiderer’s Association of Canada
Two WordPress websites were built over seven years for a national volunteer-led charitable organization, helping the Embroiderers' Association of Canada serve its members, sell courses and memberships, and grow its community online.
CLIENT
Embroiderer’s Association of Canada
SECTOR
Non-Profit National Association
RELATIONSHIP
2018 - present
SERVICES DELIVERED
WordPress Development · Bilingual · Web Design · Member Portal
Where tradition meets a modern web presence
The Embroiderers' Association of Canada (EAC) is a national non-profit membership organization dedicated to preserving traditional embroidery techniques and promoting the art form through education and community. Volunteer-led and volunteer-run, the EAC serves members across the country, offering courses, an annual seminar conference, and a wealth of shared resources, all with a small, dedicated team and limited in-house web expertise.
They came to Jester in 2018 with an aging Joomla site that wasn't serving their members. Seven years later, they came back for a full rebuild. That's the kind of relationship we're proud of.
A complex site and a membership that needed to be served better.
The EAC's website isn’t just a marketing tool; it is operational infrastructure. Members need to be able to easily purchase courses and memberships, access a password-protected portal with exclusive resources, register for seminars and exhibitions, and find information easily. At the same time, the site had to be manageable by volunteers, not developers.
On top of that, the EAC was working toward becoming a more bilingual organization, needed to move away from PayPal to a new payment processor, and wanted to attract a younger audience without losing the core membership they already had. Those are a lot of requirements, and they have a community that genuinely depended on getting it right. This is the kind of challenge we love to tackle here at Jester.
Two rebuilds. Eight years of trust.
Jester responded to the EAC's open RFP in August 2018 and was selected to rebuild their site from the ground up. When it came time to refresh the site in 2025, they teamed up with us again. Along the way, we have provided technical support and monthly maintenance of the site while empowering their team to be able to manage the day-to-day needs of the site.
2018 Joomla to WordPress
Jester migrated the EAC off an outdated Joomla CMS and built a new WordPress site designed around how their members actually use it. The new site included a password-protected member portal with restricted content and account management, e-commerce functionality for courses and memberships with payment gateway integration, a public blog with social media and RSS integration, multiple web forms for seminar registration, course registration, exhibition registration, and event submissions, and a separate seminar subdomain built on a flexible, reusable template. Volunteers were able to populate and manage the site themselves, and Jester provided training to make sure they felt confident doing it.
2025 Rebuilding for the next chapter
Seven years on, the EAC was ready for a fresh start. Jester was engaged again to rebuild the site from the ground up. A lot changed in the world of web design and development in 8 years, and rebuilding the site with modern code functionality was essential as the organization grew.
A site their volunteers can run and a membership that's better served.
The EAC now has a WordPress site built around the real complexity of their operations, from member access and course sales to event registration and bilingual content, all while remaining genuinely manageable by their team. Their members can find what they need, register for what they want, and access the resources that make their membership worthwhile
✦ HOW WE’D APPROACH THIS WITH AN AI LENS
The core challenge of the EAC is that they run a complex site that needs to be managed internally. So for Jester, this is fundamentally a usability and training job as much as a development one. AI sharpens both.
AI-Accelerated Content Development. A bilingual site for a national organization means a significant volume of content to structure, write, and translate. Today, we'd use AI to accelerate content drafting and translation workflows, helping the EAC build out both language versions in parallel rather than treating French as an afterthought. For a volunteer-led organization with limited bandwidth, that efficiency matters enormously.
Campaign Intelligence. The EAC has a clear strategic challenge: their core membership skews older, and they need to attract younger people to the craft. AI-powered audience analysis and content strategy tools would help identify where younger embroidery enthusiasts are gathering online, what language and content formats resonate with them, and how to build an SEO and content approach that grows the community over time, not just serves the members they already have.
Process Assessment & Implementation. Volunteer teams need documentation that actually gets used. We'd use AI to generate tailored, plain-language guides for every key site management task, from adding a course to approving a new member to updating the events calendar so the EAC team can operate the site confidently long after launch, without having to call us for every small change.
A good strategy doesn’t happen by accident.
Let’s talk about yours.