Get on the Bus: Systems a Small Team Can Actually Run

Get on the Bus is a national youth transit advocacy program, and I’m the digital media, web, and technical contractor on it. No agency, no team, no handoffs. The job is building systems a small team can actually run without it becoming someone’s full-time job.

That started with the site itself: built to aggregate and update a high volume of mission-critical content such as: news, grants, campaigns, and socials. All without the overhead that usually comes with it. The clearest example is GotB Social Monitor, a tool I built to replace a manual workflow: someone used to search the web, vet articles by hand, log them in a spreadsheet, then manually post the good ones. Now relevant articles get surfaced and graded automatically, the best ones get a quick human approval, and approved ones publish themselves. Same quality bar, a human still in the loop, roughly 35% less time spent on it, equating to about 10 hours a month back.

That same thinking extends into brand and content: a real brand system built out so I can turn around on-brand social graphics quickly, instead of every post being a one-off design job. It’s part of why social views are up 300% year-over-year and web traffic is up 50% (4,000+ visitors, 35 seconds average time on page). The purpose is to create a real system behind the content, not just more of it.

The Ride Guide (pictured alongside this case study) is a long-form trainer’s guide to help youth become safe, confident transit users. It is the clearest proof of that system working at scale: 270+ downloads on one piece of long-form content built with the same brand and production system as everything else.

When Halifax needed an emergency campaign, that existing foundation is what let me move fast instead of starting from zero: a landing page, custom advocacy email forms, an MLA social directory widget, and a paid Meta ads campaign, all built and launched in a matter of days. Multiple videos filmed and edited, a live advocacy counter and email templator tracking emails sent to elected officials. By the end of the 4 week campaign, we had over 50,000 social views, a 6% click-through rate, and 200+ completed advocacy form submissions.

Get on the Bus is part of a growing national movement. The Kingston program it grew out of logs 195,000+ youth transit rides a year, and an independent 2025 analysis by Limestone Analytics found every dollar invested returns $3.60 in social value.