Studio
The studio.
One person. Every layer. No handoffs.
We build donor platforms, campaign experiences, and communications infrastructure for nonprofits — treating every engagement as a long-term partnership rather than a deployment. The work is designed with intention, engineered for ownership, and maintained like it matters. Because to the organizations running on it, it does.
Chris Hanson
a.k.a. Chanson — Founder
Chris Hanson is the founder of Manna — a rare combination of product designer, frontend and backend engineer, and brand director who has spent his career building things that work as well as they look. His background spans commercial campaigns for PUMA, Reebok, and CrossFit, iOS applications shipped to the App Store, over a decade inside nonprofit fundraising at Barbells for Boobs where the organization raised more than $25 million, and custom digital platforms built from the ground up for nonprofits doing serious work in addiction recovery, fitness, and community health. Manna is the convergence of everything he has built toward.
Where Manna came from
Chris spent years at the intersection of brand and technology — designing systems that communicate clearly and engineering platforms that hold up under real use. That work kept bringing him back to nonprofits. Not because the projects were simpler, but because the stakes were higher. The tools available to these organizations were embarrassingly inadequate compared to the work they were doing in the world.
Generic SaaS with a mission-washing coat of paint, or expensive enterprise platforms that treated small and mid-size organizations like afterthoughts. Neither was acceptable. Manna was built to fix that — not by adding features to an existing category, but by starting from a different premise: that nonprofit infrastructure deserves the same quality of craft and engineering that the best consumer products get.
The intersection of design and engineering is where Manna lives. Every platform we build is both.
What comes to every engagement
Brand and visual design
Identity systems, campaign design, interface design. Every platform reflects the organization running it.
Frontend engineering
Next.js, React, and Payload CMS. Production-grade interfaces built to perform.
Backend and infrastructure
Supabase, Stripe Connect, Resend, Vercel. Secure, scalable, and built to be owned.
iOS development
Native mobile applications shipped to the App Store for organizations whose communities live on their phones.
Campaign strategy
Years of campaign work for major consumer brands, applied to nonprofit fundraising.
Integrations
Salesforce, Printful, Strava, Stripe — built native, not plugged in through Zapier.
Why the roster stays small
We work with a limited number of organizations at any given time. That’s a deliberate choice. When the roster gets too large, the work suffers. The attention diffuses. The platform stops feeling like it was made for anyone in particular and starts feeling like software.
Staying small means that when you email us, you hear back from the person who built your system. When something needs attention, it gets it the same day. When your biggest campaign of the year launches, we’re watching it with you.
Built on modern foundations
Manna runs on Next.js, Payload CMS, Supabase, Stripe Connect, Vercel, and Resend. The same infrastructure powering some of the fastest consumer applications in the world. No legacy architecture. No shared databases. No infrastructure decisions made for the lowest common denominator.
We write about how and why we build the way we do in our Notes — technical deep dives on security, data ownership, and the engineering decisions behind the platform. If you want to understand what’s under the hood before you trust us with your donor data, that’s where to start.
Read the Notes →