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Service

Charity website development

For chief executives, fundraising managers and grants officers of charities and foundations who need donations, appeals, supporter pages, grant rounds and volunteers to run from one system designed around how the organisation actually raises and gives money.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

A regional charity with a fundraising team of three takes donations through a third-party giving page, regular gifts through a direct debit bureau, event sponsorship through a second platform and cheques through the post.

  • The supporter record lives in four places and none of them agree.
  • When a long-standing regular giver rings to ask why she received an appeal addressed to a stranger, nobody can see her twelve years of giving on one screen.
  • Declarations that allow a tax reclaim were captured on paper forms years ago and filed in boxes, so the reclaim is prepared from a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts.

Where it gets harder

Appeals are built as web pages by hand and the thermometer is updated by the communications officer on Friday afternoons.

  • Supporters who want to run a sponsored walk are sent to a fundraising site where the charity cannot see who is raising what until the money arrives.
  • A foundation on the same high street has the opposite problem: two grant rounds a year, two hundred applications each, reviewed by trustees who receive a shared folder of PDFs and score them in an email thread, with outcomes letters written one at a time.
  • Volunteers are rostered by text message, and the beneficiary story on the home page has no record of who consented to it or when.
  • The money is there; the system is the thing missing.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom charity or foundation build normally covers:

  • A supporter record that brings together one-off gifts Regular gifts, event sponsorship and offline donations
  • Donation forms with one-off and regular giving Amount suggestions set by the charity, a declaration captured as a dated record with the wording the charity supplies, and recurring collection through the payment adapter with each collection recorded
  • Campaigns and appeals with targets Progress and a close date
  • Supporter fundraising pages with a target Updates, offline donations entered by the organiser and team pages
  • Grant programmes with rounds An application form built from the foundation's own questions, eligibility checks, reviewer assignment, scoring stages, a decision record and outcome letters
  • Volunteer registration with roles Availability, checks status recorded as dates, shifts and a rota
  • Impact pages fed from figures the charity enters
  • Beneficiary stories with a consent record attached
  • An annual reports and accounts archive
  • Segment email to supporters by giving history

How discovery works

Discovery works through a year with the fundraising manager, the finance lead and, for a foundation, the grants officer: where money arrives, how a regular gift starts and stops, what the reclaim file needs from the record, how an appeal is launched, what a sponsored supporter needs from their page, how a grant round is reviewed and decided, and how volunteers are rostered. Each becomes a named stage in the scope document: appeal, donate, thank, report, renew; or apply, review, decide, award, monitor.

Deliberately out of scope

  • The accounting ledger and the preparation of statutory accounts, the tax reclaim submission itself, payroll for staff, and the charity shop till. Those stay in the tools that own them and are connected where it earns its place
  • The system supplies records, not advice

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A foundation that runs two grant rounds a year with eight external reviewers and three scoring stages, and also raises funds through a spring appeal and a regular giving programme,.

That needs

  • Applicant accounts, reviewer scoring that hides other reviewers' scores until moderation
  • A decision record per application
  • A supporter record that keeps giving and grant history apart

That is a different build from a small charity that wants a good donation form, and the scope document says so plainly.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from a walk through the giving year, the current platforms, the declaration files and any grant round
  • A written scope document naming each stage from appeal to thank-you and from application to award, with what is out of scope
  • Design of the donation flow, the supporter record, the appeal page, the fundraising page and the grant review screen, checked on the devices the team and supporters use
  • The build, deployed to your hosting or ours
  • Migration of supporter records, giving history, declarations and open applications from the current platforms and spreadsheets, where relevant
  • Training for fundraising, communications, finance, grants and volunteer coordinators, with a short written guide
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your data

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access, contacts and a look at the giving platforms, the regular giving file, the declaration archive, the appeal pages and any grant application pack.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Discovery with the fundraising manager, finance lead and grants officer; giving types, declaration wording, appeal rules, grant stages and volunteer roles are agreed in the scope document with a milestone plan.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Clickable designs of the donation flow, the supporter record, the appeal and fundraising pages and the reviewer scoring screen, reviewed with the people who will use them.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in stages: supporter record, donations and declarations first, then appeals and fundraising pages, then grant rounds and reviewing, then volunteers, impact and the reports archive.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The team runs a test appeal with real supporter patterns and a mock grant round with reviewers, and tells us where it does not match how the charity works.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Form wording, declaration capture, reviewer stages, rota behaviour and reporting are adjusted from the review and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Supporters and giving history migrated, recurring collections mapped, thank-you emails tested on addresses you control, the reclaim export checked by finance, checklist signed off.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The charity runs its next appeal or grant round on the new system; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Card payment and recurring collection providers for one-off and regular gifts
  • Email and SMS providers for thank-you messages, appeal updates and volunteer shift reminders
  • Accounting software for income by fund, appeal and restriction
  • Export of declaration and gift records in the layout the tax reclaim process needs, prepared for the charity's own submission
  • External fundraising and event platforms, importing sponsorship into the supporter record
  • Video meeting platforms for reviewer panels and volunteer briefings
  • Document signing for grant agreements

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A foundation with two grant rounds, eight reviewers and a regular giving programme

The situation

A foundation received around two hundred applications in each of two rounds a year, circulated them to eight external reviewers as a folder of PDFs and collected scores by email, while a separate fundraising team ran a spring appeal and a regular giving programme through two unconnected platforms.

Why it is a custom build

This needs a custom build because the review stages, the scoring rules and the separation between giving and granting are specific to the foundation's own process, which an off-the-shelf grants or donations tool fixes in advance.

The scope we would propose

  • Applicant accounts with a form built from the foundation's own questions and an eligibility check before submission
  • Reviewer assignment by theme with blind scoring until moderation, when the grants officer sees every score side by side
  • A decision record per application with outcome letters generated from templates the trustees approve
  • Grant agreements, payment schedules and monitoring reports attached to the award
  • A supporter record for the fundraising side with one-off and regular gifts, declaration records and appeal progress, kept apart from grant data by role

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Giving types: one-off, regular collection, event sponsorship, offline gifts and in-memory giving
  • Declaration capture and the export layout the reclaim process needs
  • Appeals, campaign pages and supporter fundraising pages with teams
  • Grant programmes: rounds, form complexity, reviewer stages, moderation and monitoring
  • Volunteer roles, checks recorded, shifts and rota size
  • Volume and condition of supporter, giving and application history to migrate
  • Impact reporting and the reports archive
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Charity website package

Donations with regular giving and declaration records, appeals with progress, supporter fundraising pages, grant applications with review, volunteer shifts and a reports archive for charities and foundations.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

When is the package enough and when do we need a custom build?

The charity website package covers donations, regular giving, declaration records, appeals, fundraising pages, volunteers and a reports archive with configuration. A custom build is the honest answer for grant rounds with multi-stage review, several funds with restrictions, legacy giving records or an existing supporter database with its own structure. Discovery tells you which before anything is quoted.

Do you handle Gift Aid for us?

No, and the system does not either. It captures the declaration as a dated record with the wording you supply, stores it against the supporter and each gift, and exports the records in the layout your finance team or adviser needs for the reclaim. Whether a gift qualifies and how the claim is submitted are decisions for the charity and its advisers.

How are regular gifts collected?

Through a recurring collection provider connected during the build. The supporter sets up the gift online, the provider collects it, and the system records each collection, failure and cancellation against the supporter so the fundraising team sees the live state of the programme. The provider and mandate wording are chosen with you in the proposal.

Can trustees review grant applications without seeing each other's scores?

Yes. Reviewer accounts see only their assigned applications and their own scores until the grants officer opens moderation, at which point scores are shown side by side with comments. The stages, scoring scale and who sees what are set from your process.

Who owns the system afterwards?

The charity does. Source code and data are handed over at delivery; hosting and maintenance are optional and separately agreed, and the system can move to another provider.

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