Only 44% of charities have a digital strategy.

That’s down from 50% the year before.

Which means more than half of UK charities are making website decisions without any kind of plan. Just reacting to problems as they come up, saying yes to whoever shouts loudest, and hoping it all works out.

It doesn’t work out.

Here’s what happens instead: you end up with a website that’s accumulated features nobody uses, costs more than it should, confuses your users, and doesn’t actually help you achieve anything.

And here’s the thing that really frustrates me: strategic thinking doesn’t cost money. Implementation does. But working out what you’re trying to achieve and why? That’s free.

You just need to do it.

What “no strategy” actually looks like

It’s not dramatic. It’s just… messy.

Someone on your team has an idea. “We should add a member forum!” Nobody asks why, or who’d use it, or what problem it solves. It just sounds good. So you build it. It costs £3,000. Three people use it. You’re still paying £15/month to host it two years later.

Your donate button is in a different place on every page because different people added pages at different times and nobody said “the donate button always goes here.”

You’ve got three different ways to sign up for your newsletter because you’ve changed email platforms twice and nobody removed the old forms.

Your events page is a mess because sometimes events go in the calendar plugin, sometimes they’re blog posts, and sometimes they’re just standalone pages. It depends who added them.

None of this is catastrophic. But it’s all waste. Wasted money, wasted staff time, wasted opportunity.

And it happens because you’re making decisions without a framework for making them.

The actual costs of not having a strategy

Let me be specific about what this costs you:

You waste money on things you don’t need

Without a strategy, you can’t tell the difference between “this is important” and “this sounds nice.”

So you pay for:

• Plugins you’re not using
• Features nobody wanted
• Redesigns that don’t fix the actual problems
• Integrations that seemed clever but break constantly

I worked with a charity that spent £5,000 on a custom events booking system. Beautiful system. Problem: they ran four events a year. A simple Google Form would have done the job.

Why did they build it? Someone mentioned it in a meeting. Nobody asked “do we actually need this?” They just assumed yes.

You waste staff time on preventable problems

Your team is firefighting. The website’s broken, they fix it. Someone can’t find something, they add another menu item. The donate form isn’t working, they add a different form.

Each fix creates more complexity. More complexity creates more problems. More problems means more firefighting.

If you had a strategy, you’d fix the root cause instead of the symptom. Once. Properly.

You miss opportunities you don’t even see

This is the sneaky one.

Your website could be bringing in monthly donors, but your donation form only offers one-time gifts. You don’t even realise you’re missing out because you never thought about it strategically.

Your members are Googling questions you’ve answered in reports buried five clicks deep. They give up and email instead. Your team answers the same questions manually, over and over, because nobody thought about information architecture.

You’re not converting volunteers because your application form is too long and confusing. But you’re blaming “people not wanting to volunteer” instead of your website.

Strategy helps you spot these gaps.

You make contradictory decisions

Monday: “We need the website to be simple and easy to navigate.”

Wednesday: “Can we add this new section with five subsections?”

Friday: “Why is the menu so complicated?”

Without strategy, every decision is made in isolation. They contradict each other. The website becomes incoherent.

You can’t evaluate whether things are working

Someone asks: “Is the website effective?”

You don’t know. Effective at what? You never defined what you were trying to achieve, so you can’t tell if you’ve achieved it.

You’re spending money and time on something you can’t measure. That’s a terrible position to be in.

What a strategy actually is (it’s simpler than you think)

A strategy isn’t a 50-page document. It’s answers to these questions:

1. What is our website for?

Not “to have a web presence.” That’s not a purpose. Specifically, what should it help people do?

Example purposes:

• Help people understand if they’re eligible for our services
• Make it easy for potential volunteers to apply
• Convert one-time donors to monthly givers
• Provide members with resources without them needing to contact us
• Demonstrate our impact to funders

Pick 3-5 things. Not everything. The things that actually matter to your organisation right now.

2. Who is it for?

“Everyone” is not an answer. Who are the main groups who need to use your website?

Example groups:

• People seeking our services
• Potential donors
• Existing members
• Volunteers
• Funders
• Press/researchers

Rank them. Who matters most? Your 60-year-old service users have different needs than your 25-year-old fundraising team. You can’t optimise for both equally.

3. What do they need to be able to do?

For each group, what’s the task they’re trying to complete?

Service users need to: find out if we can help them, understand how to access support, contact us if they have questions.

Donors need to: understand our impact, donate easily, set up monthly giving, see where their money goes.

Be specific. “Find information” isn’t specific enough. Information about what, exactly?

4. What’s stopping them doing those things now?

Audit your current site against those tasks. Where does it fail?

Can service users actually find eligibility information? I bet it’s buried three clicks deep in a PDF from 2019.

Can donors easily set up monthly giving? Or is there only a one-time donation option?

Can members find resources? Or is navigation so confusing they give up?

This is your to-do list.

5. How will we know if it’s working?

Pick measurable things.

Not “improve the website” – that’s not measurable.

Measurable things:

• 50% of service enquiries come through the website form instead of phone calls
• Average donation value increases from £25 to £35
• Member login rate increases by 30%
• Time to find eligibility information reduces from 3 minutes to 30 seconds

You don’t need fancy analytics. Just clear numbers you can track.

How to build this strategy (for free)

You don’t need consultants. You need a meeting, a whiteboard (or Google Doc), and honesty.

Step 1: One-hour workshop with key people

Get together:

• Whoever manages the website day-to-day
• Someone from fundraising
• Someone who deals with service users
• Someone from leadership

Answer the five questions above. Write down the answers. Argue about them. It’s good to argue – it means you’re thinking properly.

Step 2: Test your answers

Take your draft strategy and check it against reality:

• Ask five people who use your website what they struggle with. Does it match what you think the problems are?
• Look at your Google Analytics (if you have it). Where do people actually go? Where do they leave?
• Check your inbox. What questions do people email that they should be able to answer themselves from your website?

Adjust your strategy based on what you find.

Step 3: Turn it into decisions rules

Your strategy should give you rules for making decisions:

“Does this help service users understand eligibility?”

• If yes: worth considering
• If no: probably not a priority

“Does this align with our top 3 website purposes?”

• If yes: worth considering
• If no: probably not a priority

“Will this make things simpler or more complicated?”

• Simpler: probably good
• More complicated: needs strong justification

Now when someone suggests a member forum, you can ask: “How does this help achieve our top 3 purposes? Which user group is this for? What problem does it solve that we can’t solve more simply?”

If they can’t answer, you don’t build it.

Step 4: Write it down (one page is enough)

Your strategy document:

Our website exists to:

1. [Purpose 1]
2. [Purpose 2]
3. [Purpose 3]

Our main user groups are:

1. [Group 1] – who need to [task]
2. [Group 2] – who need to [task]
3. [Group 3] – who need to [task]

Our priorities for the next 12 months:

1. [Fix thing]
2. [Build thing]
3. [Improve thing]

We’ll know it’s working when:

• [Metric 1]
• [Metric 2]
• [Metric 3]

Decision rules:

• We only add features that serve our top 3 purposes
• We prioritise simplicity over cleverness
• We test with real users before building
• We measure results, not just activity

That’s it. One page. Stick it somewhere everyone can see it.

What changes when you have a strategy

The practical differences:

Before strategy: Someone suggests adding a podcast. You say “sounds good, let’s look into it.”

After strategy: Someone suggests adding a podcast. You ask: “Which of our user groups is this for? How does it help them complete their main task? What’s the alternative – could a blog post do the same job? How would we measure if anyone listens?”

They either have good answers (in which case, great, do it) or they realise it’s not actually a priority right now.

Before strategy: Your website redesign brief is “make it look more modern and professional.”

After strategy: Your website redesign brief is “Make it easier for service users to determine eligibility (currently takes 3 minutes, target is 30 seconds). Increase mobile usability (currently 40% of users are mobile, but forms don’t work well). Improve donation journey (currently only 2% of site visitors donate, industry average is 5%).”

That’s actionable. A designer can work with that.

Before strategy: You argue about whether to put the donate button in the menu or in the top right corner. Nobody wins because there’s no framework for deciding.

After strategy: You ask: “Which placement makes it easier for donors to complete their task?” You test it. You pick the one that works. Done.

Common objections (and why they’re wrong)

“We don’t have time for strategy”

You’re spending time anyway. You’re just spending it on solving the same problems repeatedly instead of solving them once.

Strategy doesn’t take time. It saves time.

“Our situation changes too much to plan ahead”

A strategy isn’t a rigid five-year plan. It’s a framework for making decisions.

Yes, things change. Your strategy should too. Review it every 6-12 months. Adjust as needed. But that’s still better than having no framework at all.

“We need everything, we can’t just pick 3 things”

No, you don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.

Pick the 3 things that matter most right now. Do those well. Then pick the next 3.

Trying to do everything means doing nothing well.

“This feels too simple to be a real strategy”

Good. Simple is what you want.

Complicated strategies don’t get used. Simple ones do.

If your strategy fits on one page and everyone understands it, you’ve done it right.

Real example: Small charity, proper strategy

A youth charity I worked with had a mess of a website. Hadn’t been updated properly in three years. They asked me to redesign it.

First question: “What should the website do?”

They thought about it. Talked to their team. Came back with:

Main purposes:

1. Help young people access mental health resources without needing to speak to anyone (many weren’t comfortable calling)
2. Help parents/teachers spot when a young person needs support
3. Show funders the impact of their work

Main users:

1. Young people aged 13-18 (priority)
2. Parents and teachers
3. Potential funders

Specific tasks:

• Young people: find resources anonymously, understand what support exists, self-refer if ready
• Parents/teachers: identify warning signs, find advice on how to help, refer someone
• Funders: see impact data, understand reach, find reports

Measures of success:

• 40% of referrals come through website (currently 10%)
• 50% of resource downloads are by young people themselves (currently 20% – mostly professionals)
• Average funding application includes website data (currently they struggle to show digital reach)

That strategy changed everything.

We didn’t redesign the whole site. We:

• Made resources easier for young people to find (bigger buttons, clearer categories, no jargon)
• Added a simple self-referral form (three questions, not the intimidating 20-field form they had)
• Created a clear impact dashboard funders could link to
• Fixed mobile experience (most young people were on phones)

Cost: £6,000 for the changes, not £15,000 for a full redesign.

That happened because they had a strategy. They knew what they were trying to achieve.

Start now (yes, actually now)

You don’t need to wait for the perfect moment. You don’t need consultant approval. You don’t need a big budget.

Here’s what you can do this week:

Monday: Block out one hour in your calendar for next week. Invite 3-4 key people.

Wednesday: Send them the five questions from this article. Ask them to think about answers.

Next week: Have the meeting. Answer the questions. Write down one page.

Following week: Test your strategy by using it to make one decision about your website. Does it make the decision easier? If yes, you’re on the right track.

That’s it. You now have a strategy. It might not be perfect. That’s fine. It’s better than nothing, and you can refine it as you go.

The real cost of not having a website strategy isn’t the money. It’s the opportunity cost. All the things you could have achieved if you’d just been a bit more intentional about it.

So be intentional.

Need help turning your strategy into action? I work with charities to implement website improvements that actually align with what you’re trying to achieve. Get in touch.