Running the station's web presence, and a safe route for contributors

The situation

Claremont Community Media Center — Claremont Community Television — is the 501(c)(3) that runs public, education and government programming for Claremont, New Hampshire and Sullivan County. Channel 8 carries school board meetings, local programmes and Sunday worship; Channel 10 carries city council, zoning, planning, conservation commission and county commissioner meetings.

Two things have to work. Residents need to watch, live or afterwards. And an organisation with a $140K budget and no technical staff needs a website that does not require a developer on call to change anything.

The honest disclosure

Bee Balm’s principal is also this organisation’s Executive Director. That is stated plainly rather than buried: this was not an arm’s-length commission. What it means is unusually complete knowledge of the operation — the broadcast workflow, the municipal relationships and the funding constraints — informing every decision.

What was built

A site that leads with watching. Live streams for both channels are the first thing on the page, because that is what most visitors came for. The video library sits beneath, browsable rather than being an archive you need to already know your way around.

A publishing pipeline for contributors. The more durable piece is the least visible. The site is set up so a developer who is not staff can make changes, review them and publish them safely — version control through Git, deployment through Cloudflare. No handing files to someone, no editing live, no single person as the bottleneck for every change.

That matters because small nonprofits rarely have a second developer and almost never have a safe way for an outside contributor to help. Giving a volunteer a route to ship is the difference between occasional help and sustained contribution.

Where that pipeline paid off

The School Board Meeting Navigator — the tool that lets residents find a specific item inside the school board meeting library instead of scrubbing through a three-hour recording — was built by Kevin Tyson, using LLM-assisted development. Bee Balm’s part was polishing it and providing the workflow through which it reaches the live site.

It is worth naming because it demonstrates the point of the infrastructure. A community media organisation got a genuinely useful piece of civic software because a capable contributor had a safe route to publish.

Results

Over the period, monthly programming output tripled from roughly 20 to over 60 community, educational and municipal programmes, and digital reach across platforms grew by more than 1,300% in a single year.

The web work sits alongside a full modernisation of the station: 4K production standards, two internal studios, a mobile production unit, and the streaming system the site depends on.

The station’s internal assignment desk is a separate piece of work. Read the Events to Cover case study.