We’ve spent years building websites and digital tools for charities. Over that time we’ve formed a fairly clear view of what’s getting in their way.
Now, we’re feeling a growing sense that the ground is about to shift under all of us.
This post is about how we see things now, where we think they’re heading for the charity-digital intersection, and what we’re building in response.
How we see things now
Small charities are asked to communicate like big ones. Supporters, funders and the public expect a good website, a regular newsletter, an active social presence and a smooth way to give. Unfortunately, that expectation doesn’t scale down with the size of the team. In most of the charities we work with, all of it falls to one person – often someone who has another job too.
The tools have multiplied, but they don’t connect. A typical small charity runs somewhere between five and ten separate tools: a website builder, a CRM, an email platform, a donations provider, an event ticketing service, an online shop, a social scheduler, a shared drive. Each one makes sense on its own but together they often create a hidden job – moving the same information between systems, by hand, again and again. Stressful, error-prone and boring.
The knowledge lives in people’s heads. What the charity does, who it helps, how it talks about its work, case studies and stories – none of that exists anywhere the tools can use it. Every newsletter, post and page starts with a blank screen, and when someone leaves, a good chunk of that knowledge leaves with them.
The result is charities spending their limited time on the mechanics of communication rather than the substance of it.
Where we think things are heading
AI is becoming part of everyday comms work. Many charity teams are already using AI tools to draft posts and emails. It helps, but the output is often generic, because the tool knows nothing about the charity it’s writing for. A lot of guesswork is often involved.
How people find charities is changing. A growing number of people now ask an AI assistant rather than scroll a page of search results. The charities that show up well will be the ones whose story is clear, consistent and well organised across everything they publish. This has the remarkable potential to disrupt the established order, empowering smaller orgs over those who simply have the biggest marketing budget.
Generic content is getting cheaper, and trust more valuable. As the internet fills with machine-written copy, the things that make a charity credible – real stories, real impact, a recognisable voice – matter so much more. Supporters and funders really can tell the difference.
Put together, this points somewhere specific: a charity’s knowledge – organised, current and in one place – could be its most useful digital asset. The tools that matter will be the ones that build on it, rather than asking you to start from scratch every time.
How we’re solving for today and the future
We’re building a solution especially for small-mid sized charities. It’s called Unific.
Unific is one connected space for a charity’s communications. It’s designed to ease the pressure charities feel today, and to put them in a strong position for what’s coming.
For today: fewer tools, less copying and pasting. Your website, contacts, newsletters, donation forms, event tickets, shop products and social posts live in one place and share the same information. Update something once and it’s present and correct everywhere.
For tomorrow: your knowledge, working for you. At the centre of Unific is a Knowledge Base. You add what you already have – strategy documents, impact reports, case studies, tone of voice guidance, past campaigns – and it becomes the foundation everything else draws on. When Unific helps you write, it starts from what your charity actually says and does, not from a blank prompt.
Bringing the two together: Cascade. When something happens – say you publish a donation form for a winter appeal, or put tickets on sale for a fundraising event – Cascade drafts what usually follows: social posts, a newsletter piece, a website update. All of it drawn from your Knowledge Base and all of it consistent. The time you’d have spent rewriting the same message six times goes back into the work that needs a real human.
AI is central to this project, but because it’s met with justified scepticism, there are a few things we’re holding ourselves to along the way:
- A person always decides. Nothing goes out without someone reading it. Every draft web page, social post or newsletter can be revised or accepted. When we spoke to charities, this was the line between a tool they’d trust and one they basically wouldn’t.
- Built with charities. Before writing much code, we sat down with nine small and mid-sized charities to understand how they actually work. Their answers changed the plan for the better – as we knew it would.
- Built for the UK sector first. Consent and contact data are designed with UK GDPR and PECR in mind from day one, and donations record and store Gift Aid declarations.
Where we are
The Knowledge Base, website builder, newsletters and social post generator are all working in our development build. Event ticketing and product sales are next in line. There’s plenty still to do, and we’d rather get it right than get it out fast.
We’ll open a free beta to a small group of charities first – ideally ones already doing their own digital comms, who’ll use Unific on real work and tell us honestly what they think. If that sounds like you, stay tuned and look out for updates on our Digital Insider newsletter.