How to Get a New Charity Website Approved by Your Trustees

You know your website isn’t working. You see the evidence every week – the funder who mentioned they struggled to find your impact data, the corporate prospect who went quiet after you sent them your URL, the referral form that nobody uses because it’s buried three clicks deep on a page that hasn’t been updated since 2021.

And yet, your trustees see the quarterly report.

The gap between the operational reality of a charity’s digital presence and the view from the boardroom is one of the most common reasons small charity website projects stall, or don’t even start. And it’s not because trustees don’t care about the organisation’s effectiveness, or because they’re opposed to investment – it’s because the case hasn’t been made in terms that connect the website to the things trustees are constitutionally required to care about: mission delivery, financial sustainability, and organisational risk.

This article is for CEOs and senior leaders who need to build that case. It won’t tell you how to design a website. It will help you have the conversation that gets one approved.

Why trustees can be sceptical

Before making the case, it’s worth understanding the resistance.

Trustees who aren’t embedded in the day-to-day operations of a charity sometimes hold a fairly limited mental model of what a website does. In that model, a website is a brochure – it tells people who you are and how to contact you. If it currently does those things, even imperfectly, it’s hard to see why it needs significant investment.

This isn’t unreasonable. It’s simply a model that hasn’t kept pace with how digital presence actually functions in the charity sector today. For most small and medium-sized charities, the website isn’t a brochure. It’s the front door through which funders, donors, corporate partners, referral professionals, and beneficiaries all form their first impression of the organisation. It’s the platform on which your impact is communicated, your credibility is established, and your ability to attract income is – at least in part – determined.

That shift in how websites function hasn’t always been communicated clearly to boards. Your job, before the agenda item lands, is to do that communication work.

Start with outcomes rather than features

The most common mistake CEOs make when presenting a website project to trustees is leading with what the new site will look like or do, rather than what it will achieve.

Trustees don’t need to understand navigation structures, CMS choices, or the difference between a page builder and a custom theme. They need to understand the answer to one question: what is this investment going to do for the organisation?

Frame the proposal around outcomes your board already cares about. The most persuasive ones for most charity trustees are income, funder relationships, and risk.

On income: a blend of sector research shows that a well-performing charity website can influence between 20% and 60% of total organisational income, through online donations, funder confidence, corporate partnership development, and the credibility signals your digital presence sends to everyone who considers supporting you. For a charity with an income of £100,000, that’s a potential influence range of £20,000 to £60,000. For one turning over £300,000, the stakes are proportionally higher. Your trustees may not have thought about the website in these terms before. Present the numbers, and the conversation shifts.

On funder relationships: most grant-making trusts and foundations will look at your website as part of any due diligence process. A site that is outdated, inaccessible, or doesn’t clearly communicate your impact is a passive argument against your funding applications – one you may never be told about directly. If your organisation has experienced unexplained rejections or lighter-than-expected grant offers, your website’s credibility is worth examining as a possible contributing factor.

On risk: accessibility compliance is increasingly a funder expectation and, for many charities, a legal exposure. If your current website fails basic WCAG accessibility standards – which many sites built on DIY platforms or by volunteers do, without their owners realising – you are carrying a reputational and potentially legal risk that your trustees have governance responsibility for. This is a strong argument in a boardroom, and one that is often underused.

Make the cost of doing nothing visible

Trustees are trained to scrutinise expenditure. They are less often asked to scrutinise the cost of inaction – but that cost is real, and making it visible is one of the most effective things you can do to shift the dynamic of the conversation.

The cost of your current website isn’t just what you’re paying to host it. It’s the staff time absorbed by a site that’s difficult to update, the income you may not be generating because your online presence isn’t doing its job, the funder relationships that aren’t developing because your impact isn’t clearly communicated, and the credibility gap between the quality of your work and the quality of your digital representation of it.

None of these costs appear on a balance sheet. But they are real, and framing them explicitly – “here is what our current website is costing us” before presenting “here is what a better one would cost” – reframes the decision from a discretionary spend into a risk management conversation.

You don’t need precise figures to make this argument. You need to be specific enough to be credible. “Our website has not been updated in three years and fails accessibility standards” is more persuasive than “our website is a bit out of date.” “We have had three funding conversations in the last year where the funder mentioned our website” is more persuasive than “we think our website may be affecting our funding.”

If you have Google Analytics access, bring it. Bounce rate, average session duration, and mobile traffic share are all data points that tell a meaningful story about whether your current site is serving the people it needs to serve. Even basic data, presented clearly, gives trustees something concrete to respond to rather than an assertion to accept or reject.

Deal with the “can’t we get it done for free?” question

In almost every trustee conversation about a charity website, someone asks whether it could be done pro bono, by a volunteer, or through a corporate partnership. Prepare for this question and have a clear answer ready.

The honest answer is: sometimes, under very specific conditions, a simple free website is a viable short-term option for a very early-stage charity with minimal needs (we wrote about this earlier). It is not a reliable, sustainable, or strategically sound solution for a charity with income, funder relationships, and growing ambitions.

The risks of free websites are specific and worth naming clearly in a trustee context. Volunteer relationships are fragile – the person who builds the site may not be available to maintain or fix it. Corporate pro bono builds are often completed by employees who are skilled in their own field but not in web design or accessibility. Neither route comes with ongoing support, guaranteed availability, or accountability for the outcome. And the hidden costs – staff time, remediation when things go wrong, and the ongoing credibility damage of a site that looks amateurish – frequently exceed the cost of a professional solution.

The question isn’t “can we get this for free?” It’s “what do we actually need, and what is the right way to get it?”

Present a clear, costed recommendation

A trustee board cannot approve a vague proposal. By the time you bring the item to the meeting, you need to arrive with a specific recommendation, a clear cost, and a rationale for why that option is the right one for the organisation at this stage.

For most small charities – those operating under £500,000 income, running lean teams, and needing a professional, reliable website that reflects their work and meets funder expectations – the right answer is a fixed-fee, done-for-you solution that removes the uncertainty and risk from the process entirely.

Our Community Platform is built precisely for this. At £895 per year, it is a complete website service – design, content refresh, accessibility compliance to WCAG 2.2 AA, hosting, and ongoing support – delivered in under four weeks with minimal demand on your team’s time. For a charity with a £100,000 income, that’s less than 1% of annual revenue. For a charity turning over £250,000, the proportion is smaller still. Presented against the income influence potential of a well-performing website, the return on that investment is straightforward to make the case for.

Trustees respond well to fixed-fee proposals because fixed fees eliminate the risk of overrun. There is no “it depends” in the budget line. The cost is the cost, and the scope is fully defined. That predictability matters to a board that is, rightly, focused on financial stewardship.

For charities that have grown significantly and are generating in excess of £500,000 per year – organisations whose website needs have become genuinely complex, whose audiences are multiple and demanding, and whose digital presence needs to reflect sector leadership rather than simply competency – the right recommendation is different. At this scale, a bespoke project through our Scale-up Service is the appropriate investment: a higher-cost, higher-impact engagement involving strategic workshops, stakeholder engagement, custom design, and the integrations that a growing organisation needs. The case to trustees at this level is made on different terms – the website as a platform for organisational ambition, not just a credibility baseline – but the structure of the argument is the same: outcomes first, cost second, risk of inaction third.

Anticipate the questions

Before the meeting, work through the questions a well-prepared trustee is likely to ask, and have clear answers ready.

“How did we arrive at this figure?” Have a rationale for the chosen provider and the chosen approach. If you’ve looked at alternatives, say so and explain why this option is the right one.

“How will we know if it’s working?” Define two or three success metrics upfront – enquiries through the website, funder feedback, traffic from organic search – and commit to reporting against them. Trustees are more comfortable approving investments that come with built-in accountability.

“Who will manage this internally?” Identify the staff member who will be the day-to-day contact for the project and the ongoing point of responsibility for the site. Even if the platform is largely managed for you, trustees want to know there’s internal ownership.

“What happens if it doesn’t deliver?” Acknowledge the question seriously. A fixed-fee, professionally supported platform carries significantly less delivery risk than a bespoke or volunteer-built project, and you can make that argument explicitly.

“Can this wait?” This is the hardest question to answer, because the honest answer is often “technically yes, but at a cost.” Name that cost – another year of funder credibility gaps, another year of accessibility risk, another year of the organisation being represented online by something that doesn’t reflect its quality. The decision to wait is a decision, and it has consequences.

The conversation before the meeting

One of the most effective things a CEO can do before a significant trustee agenda item is have informal conversations with key trustees in advance – particularly the chair and the finance trustee. Not to lobby, but to understand where the resistance is likely to come from and make sure your proposal speaks to it.

If your finance trustee’s primary concern is cash flow, lead with the fixed-fee structure and the predictable annual cost. If your chair is focused on mission delivery, lead with the impact on beneficiary reach and funder credibility. If a trustee with a technology or marketing background is on the board, engage them early – their endorsement in the room will carry weight with colleagues who feel less equipped to evaluate the proposal.

By the time the item reaches the agenda, the conversation shouldn’t feel like a surprise. It should feel like the logical conclusion of discussions already underway.

The underlying argument

The case for a new charity website is, at its heart, the case that your organisation’s digital presence is a strategic asset – one that either works for you or works against you, and one that deserves the same level of considered investment as any other operational priority.

Trustees who understand that argument will approve appropriate investment. The CEO’s job is to make sure they do – clearly, specifically, and in terms that connect to the governance responsibilities they already take seriously.

That’s the work. And it’s worth doing properly.