Community Platform: A Client’s Review

Earlier this year, we launched one of our first Community Platform websites for Magic Me, a fabulous intergenerational arts charity based in London.

The project went so quickly and smoothly that Ben, Magic Me’s joint CEO and Julia, Fundraising & Development Manager, wanted to share their experience. Below is a collaborative article we wrote to outline how we brought their new site to life in a matter of weeks…

Ben, how did you first encounter Matt? And what convinced you that All Things Equal was a good match for Magic Me’s needs?

It actually started with a headache. We were wrestling with our old legacy website: a tricky and expansive WordPress setup where we were either limited by our own technical skills or we spent hours just trying to move a single button. I first came across Matt and Nick through All Things Equal’s free digital Q&A sessions. They were just… helping. Giving back to the charity sector with no strings attached. That kind of thoughtfulness and collaboration really mirrored our own values at Magic Me, and it made me curious.

When we finally decided to take the plunge and replace the site, Matt sent over a website cost calculator. When the result came back at £895 a year, I’ll be honest: I was skeptical. Usually, scoping a bespoke site is a long, time intensive process. I thought there had to be a catch.

But after a demo, I realised the “catch” was actually just a much smarter, more disruptive model. Matt said if they get 50, 100 charities on the platform then everyone gets a great product at an excellent price and of course All Things Equal get paid. The CMS is built on WordPress – which we were already using but it was miles ahead in terms of simplicity. It was intuitive. For a busy, non-technical team like ours, that was a clincher.

What really proved the match, though, was how it allowed us to be creative with our limited resources. We didn’t have months in a development phase. We wanted to move fast. Because the platform was ready to go, we were able to deliver the entire site in just six weeks. We designed our own two-week content sprint which combined Julia’s excellent copywriting skills with AI to optimise the content for SEO. Then Matt delivered the site in 4 weeks – over email! It felt like a very Magic Me way of working, thinking creatively to bridge the gap between a tight budget and a high-quality end product.

Ultimately, the maths just worked. It would take five or more years for the cost of this platform to reach the initial quote of a bespoke build. And knowing that security and functionality updates of the platform are regular means we’ve invested in something that will grow with us. If we rebrand tomorrow? We just update the assets and colour palette and – boom – we have a refreshed site. No new build, no starting from scratch.

Matt, can you tell us a bit about your vision for All Things Equal?

We launched All Things Equal with a simple ambition: to help charities of every size gain the tools, skills and confidence to scale their impact with digital technology.

A large part of any charity’s digital ecosystem, regardless of size, is their website. But the website design sector can be very confusing, with prices differing wildly, and few discernible differences between what’s actually on offer. As a result, many small charities are overwhelmed by options, and when you consider the limited resources they have to conduct research and determine their project objectives, it often comes down to a matter of price. The big problem here is that buying cheap in the web design space is often a recipe for disaster, as cheaper service providers typically do not consider website accessible, structure, content, and often use off-the-shelf templates, forcing the charity to adopt whatever theme they’ve chosen. It’s also not unusual for charities to find themselves locked out of websites, locked into contracts, or dealing with freelancers ghosting them.

Our mission is to fix this by providing a solid, reliable, high quality offering, whilst retaining the relatively low price point. That is what Community Platform is all about.

Ben, you’ve worked on multiple website projects over the years. How did the Community Platform process compare?

I’ve been involved in various capacities in six website builds over the years – four of them with external agencies. Those bespoke builds are often incredible, but they are time intensive and require lots of backwards and forwards. This process felt like shifting into a different gear entirely.

It’s an adjustment, certainly. It’s less about regular meetings and more about momentum. As long as you’re prepared to be decisive – which we were, thanks to our two-week content sprint – it’s an incredibly efficient way to work. By the end of that second week, we already had a draft site to play with. That was huge for us. It meant the team could actually learn the system in real-time, building out extra pages and getting a feel for the site long before we went live.

The biggest difference for me was the long-term sustainability. In the past, I’ve seen how maintenance and developer support for bespoke setups can really add up over time – sometimes those ongoing costs alone equaled what we’re now paying for this entire platform. And while this CMS provides a framework rather than a blank canvas, that’s actually its strength. It gives us a professional, modern structure that is simple for our non-technical staff (me!) to manage, without the anxiety of potentially breaking the design.

In terms of the final product? I once worked on a £10,000 bespoke site, and this platform gives us 80-90% of that same quality for a fraction of the cost. It’s been a really creative way to make our budget work harder, ensuring that every penny saved on web development can go straight back into our community projects. We’ve ended up with a high-spec, beautiful site that reflects the quality of Magic Me’s work.