Every fortnight, we run an open Digital Q&A session for charity and nonprofit teams – a chance to bring your questions and challenges: the things you’re stuck on, the decisions you’re not sure about. You can find out more and sign up for a future session here.
This fortnight’s session ended up being a deep conversation with a small, longstanding animal welfare charity, writes Matt Saunders. It’s run entirely by a small group of trustees, all volunteers, no paid staff, and it’s been quietly rescuing and rehoming animals for over 25 years. The conversation ended up covering succession planning, legal structure, website governance, and the very human challenge of trying to modernise an organisation built on long-standing personal relationships. It’s a situation a lot of small, volunteer-led charities will recognise, so we wanted to share what came out of it.
Q: We’re a small, ageing trustee board trying to recruit specialist volunteers across the whole country. It’s proving really difficult. Where do we start?
This is one of the most common versions of a challenge we hear from small, specialist charities: the work is meaningful and in demand, but the pool of people with the right knowledge, time, and physical space to help is small and scattered.
The first thing worth separating out is what kind of help you actually need. “More volunteers” is too broad a goal to act on. In this case, the real need was specific – people with niche expertise, who also have physical space available, spread across different parts of the country. That’s a much more targeted recruitment brief than a generic appeal, and it should be communicated as such. The clearer and more specific the ask, the easier it is for the right person to recognise themselves in it.
The second is storytelling. Charities like this one often have remarkable, emotionally engaging stories – animals rescued from difficult situations, transformed through care – but those stories rarely make it past the people closest to the work. If you don’t have time to write them up and share them, that’s a resourcing problem worth solving, even informally, because this kind of content is consistently what drives engagement and interest from potential supporters and volunteers alike.
The third is digital readiness. If your online presence doesn’t reflect the scale or professionalism of an organisation that’s been running successfully for decades, it will completely undersell you to exactly the audience you most want to reach – particularly younger, digitally-native people who are used to slicker, more intuitive websites and expect to find what they’re looking for in a couple of clicks, not five or six.
Q: We’re currently an unincorporated association, but we’re thinking about incorporating so we can hold property and other assets more easily. What should we be thinking about?
Moving from an unincorporated association to an incorporated structure – commonly a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) – is a significant but fairly common step for charities that have grown to the point where they need to hold assets, sign contracts, or eventually employ staff in their own right, rather than through individual trustees personally taking on that risk.
It’s worth being honest that this involves more paperwork and more formal governance than an unincorporated structure – but for an organisation thinking about long-term sustainability, particularly around holding property, it’s usually the right direction to move in. If you don’t already have access to someone who has been through this process recently, it’s well worth connecting with another charity that has, simply to understand the practical steps and timeline involved before committing.
Q: Our website is outdated, hard to navigate, and doesn’t reflect who we are – but there’s strong internal resistance to changing it. How do we move forward?
This is a common situation in smaller, longstanding charities, and it’s rarely really about the website itself. It’s almost always about control, identity, and the discomfort of letting go of something that one person has built and maintained for a long time, sometimes for decades.
The most useful thing you can do here is reframe the conversation from subjective to objective. Rather than debating whether the website “looks fine” or whether someone “likes it,” gather evidence of how it’s actually performing against the goals the organisation needs it to achieve. If people contacting you can’t find a form that should take one click, if there’s no record of who can access or edit the site, if the structure makes it hard for new visitors to understand what you do within the first few seconds – those are measurable problems, not matters of taste. Evidence depersonalises the conversation. It’s much harder to defend “I like it the way it is” against “fifteen people this year have phoned in because they couldn’t find the form” than it is to defend it against another person’s opinion.
It’s also worth recognising that a new site doesn’t have to mean cutting anyone out. If someone has been the long-term custodian of your digital presence, the goal isn’t necessarily to remove them – it’s to build something more sustainable that more than one person can manage, with proper shared access, so the organisation isn’t dependent on a single individual indefinitely. Often, once that person sees a better tool that’s genuinely easier to use, the resistance softens considerably. Showing rather than just describing tends to help.
Q: We keep having the same conversations about our strategy and priorities, but nothing actually changes. Would bringing in an outside facilitator help?
Almost certainly, yes – and this is especially true for organisations where the trustees or core team are also personal friends, or have known each other for many years. In that context, difficult conversations about roles, responsibilities, and necessary change often get quietly avoided, not because people don’t see the problem, but because nobody wants to be the one who upsets a long-standing relationship.
An independent, neutral facilitator changes that dynamic considerably. They can ask the direct questions that insiders feel uncomfortable asking. They can hold the room to actually reaching a decision, rather than letting the conversation circle without resolution. And because they have no personal history with anyone in the room, pushback or disagreement doesn’t carry the same emotional weight it would if it came from a colleague or friend.
The most effective version of this kind of session usually starts before everyone gets in the room – gathering everyone’s perspective individually in advance, so that every voice is represented in the conversation rather than the loudest or most senior voice dominating it. The goal isn’t to override anyone, but to build a shared, agreed direction that the whole group has had a genuine hand in shaping – so that decisions, once made, actually stick.
A word on succession and digital access risk
One thing that came up clearly in this conversation deserves a wider mention, because it’s a risk we see surprisingly often in small charities: a single individual holding sole control of website access, passwords, domains, or email accounts, with no shared record of how to get back in if that person becomes unavailable, unwell, or simply unreachable.
This isn’t really a technology problem – it’s a governance one. Every organisation, no matter how small, should have at least two people with full access to its critical digital accounts, and a simple, securely stored record of what those accounts are and how to access them. It sounds obvious, but it’s one of the most common gaps we see, and one of the easiest to fix – right up until the moment it suddenly isn’t.
These sessions are always a reminder that the challenges facing charities aren’t really about size – they’re about resource, confidence, and finding the right place to focus. If any of the questions above resonated with you, we’d love to see you at a future fortnightly session. You can find out more and register here.
And if you’d rather have a one-to-one conversation about what any of this means for your organisation specifically, feel free to get in touch with me at All Things Equal – this is exactly the kind of work we do.