What to Include in a Charity Website Brief

A good website brief is one of the most underrated documents in the charity sector. Get it right and it does three things at once: it forces your organisation to get clear on what you actually need, it gives potential agencies enough to work with properly, and it makes comparing proposals genuinely meaningful rather than an exercise in guesswork.

Get it wrong – or skip it entirely – and you’ll find yourself sitting in a kickoff meeting trying to explain your vision to people who are starting from scratch. That costs time, money, and goodwill.

This guide walks you through everything a charity website brief should contain, with some hard-earned advice about where charities tend to go wrong.

Why bother writing a brief at all?

It’s a fair question. Many charities commission websites without one – they have a conversation with an agency, share some inspiration links, and see what comes back. Sometimes it works. More often, it results in misaligned proposals, unclear pricing, and a first meeting that’s really just a delayed scoping exercise.

A brief doesn’t need to be long or beautifully formatted. It needs to be honest and specific. A four-page brief that clearly explains your goals, your audiences, and your constraints will get you better proposals than a twelve-page document full of aspirational language and vague objectives.

It also gives you something to hold the project against later. Scope creep – where a project gradually expands beyond what was agreed – is one of the most common causes of budget overruns and delays in charity website projects. A brief is your first line of defence against it.

One more thing worth saying upfront: a brief is a starting point, not a finished specification. If you’re commissioning a bespoke website, a good agency will take what you’ve written and go much deeper – running discovery workshops, stakeholder interviews, and strategic sessions to pressure-test your thinking before a single page is designed. We’ll cover more on that below.

1. About your organisation

Start with the basics. Agencies need to understand who you are before they can design anything useful for you.

This section should cover your mission and what you do in plain language, who you serve (beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, referrers – most charities have several distinct audiences), your size in rough terms (staff, income, reach), and whether you’re currently going through any significant change – a rebrand, a new strategy, a merger, or a shift in how you deliver services.

Don’t write this as a copy-paste from your About page. Write it for someone who’s never heard of you and needs to understand the shape of your organisation in five minutes. The more clearly you articulate what makes your charity distinctive, the more the eventual design can reflect that.

2. Why you’re commissioning a new website – and why now

This is the section most briefs skip, and yet it’s one of the most useful.

Agencies who understand the reason for a project make much better decisions throughout it. Are you redesigning because your current site is five years old and no longer reflects your brand? Because you’ve just gone through a rebrand and the old site is now a mismatch? Because your CMS is so difficult to use that your team avoids updating the site altogether? Because a major funder has raised concerns about your online presence? Because you’re about to launch a new programme and need infrastructure to support it?

All of these are valid reasons. All of them lead to slightly different briefs. A charity whose primary pain point is content management will need a different solution to one whose main challenge is donor conversion. Being clear about this upfront saves everyone time.

It’s also worth noting any relevant timing pressures. A significant anniversary campaign, a major funding decision, or a trustee meeting at which you want to present a live site – these are all things an agency needs to factor into its planning.

3. Your audiences

This section needs more thought than most briefs give it.

Start by listing every distinct group who uses or might use your website. For most charities, this includes beneficiaries or service users, individual donors, grant-making trusts and foundations, corporate partners, volunteers, referral professionals (GPs, social workers, teachers), journalists, and potential staff or trustees.

Then proceed with ruthless honesty: who matters most? Not every audience can be the primary focus of a website. A charity that tries to serve all of these groups equally well often ends up serving none of them particularly well. Your brief should indicate which audiences are the priority, what they need from the site, and what success looks like for each of them.

A good example of this thinking in practice is our work with British Youth Music Theatre (BYMT), the UK’s largest commissioner of new musicals. BYMT’s website serves a complex mix of audiences – parents and young people booking onto camps and auditions, donors, and a highly active comms team publishing content regularly. Getting clarity on who needed what, and in what order, was central to the project’s success. As BYMT’s Marketing Manager Naomi put it, “audience specific journeys were thoughtfully considered” – and that work starts in the brief.

If you have any existing research – user surveys, Google Analytics data showing what people search for most, feedback from beneficiaries about the current site – include it. Even rough data is better than assumptions.

4. Your goals and what success looks like

Be specific here. “We want a website that better represents who we are” is not a goal – it’s a feeling. Do your best to translate it into something measurable.

Goals might include increasing the number of online donations, increasing the conversion rate of grant enquiries from the website, reducing the number of support calls from people who can’t find information they need, making the site manageable for a non-technical staff member to update without agency support, or improving search visibility for key terms in your sector.

Include any metrics you already track – current traffic figures, donation conversion rates, bounce rates – so an agency can benchmark progress against them. If you don’t currently measure anything, say so. A good agency will help you think about what’s worth tracking, but only if they know they’re starting from zero.

When we worked with Magic Me, an intergenerational arts charity, their brief articulated three clear goals for the new site: generate more individual donations, attract corporate partners, and build credibility with funders. That clarity made it straightforward to prioritise content, structure navigation, and measure success after launch – and it helped us deliver the project in under six weeks.

5. Features and functionality

List what you need the site to actually do. This is different from how it should look or feel – that comes later.

Work through each section of your current site and be honest about what’s working and what isn’t. Then think about what’s missing. Common functionality for charity websites includes online donation forms (and whether you need to process Gift Aid), event listings and booking, a news or blog section, a resource or publication library, email newsletter sign-up, a searchable directory of services by location, member-only or restricted content areas, multilingual content, and integration with a CRM.

Be clear about which of these are essential and which are desirable. Agencies use this to structure proposals and pricing – if everything is listed as a must-have, the project either becomes unaffordable or the agency has to make difficult assumptions about what to prioritise.

Also note anything you specifically don’t want. If your current site has a feature that nobody uses and you’re tired of maintaining it, say so.

6. Technical requirements and integrations

This section trips up a lot of charities because it requires technical knowledge they don’t necessarily have. Don’t worry about getting it perfectly right – just share what you know.

Cover which CRM or database you use to manage supporters and contacts (Salesforce, Beacon, Donorfy, and Raiser’s Edge are common in the sector), which email marketing platform you use, whether you take online donations and through which platform (JustGiving, Donorbox, Stripe, PayPal), whether you have a preference for which CMS the new site is built on, and whether you have existing hosting arrangements.

If any of these systems need to talk to each other – for example, if a donation on your website should automatically update a donor record in your CRM – flag it here. Integrations are often where project costs and complexity are underestimated. In the BYMT project, for instance, we decoupled the site’s booking and payment functionality from the CMS entirely, moving it to Beacon CRM – a decision that made the website significantly faster and easier to manage, but one that needed to be scoped carefully from the outset.

If you genuinely don’t know the answers to these questions, that’s fine. A competent agency will help you map your existing systems as part of the discovery process. Just note that this conversation still needs to happen.

7. Design direction

This is where charities often either over-specify (a lengthy deck of inspiration screenshots that the whole team has inputted on) or under-specify (just “modern and clean”). Aim for the middle.

Share two or three websites – inside or outside the charity sector – that you genuinely like, and explain specifically what appeals about each. Is it the tone of the photography? The way complex information is structured? The boldness of the colour palette? The more specific you can be, the more useful it is.

Also share websites that don’t work for you and explain why. Sometimes what you don’t want is easier to articulate than what you do.

If you have a brand identity – a style guide, defined colours and fonts, approved photography – say so and confirm whether the new site should follow it or whether a refresh is in scope.

One thing to be open about: most charities want their website to look like the sector’s best-funded organisations. That’s understandable, but a brief should reflect your actual budget, not just your aspirational one. An agency who knows your real constraints will design something appropriate. An agency who discovers your constraints after proposing will either have to redesign their proposal or compromise the work.

8. Budget

Most charities are reluctant to put a number in a brief. The thinking is usually that if you share your budget, agencies will simply propose something that costs exactly that amount.

In practice, the opposite is true. Without a budget, agencies have to guess what level of solution is appropriate – and they’ll often guess wrong. One agency will propose a £6,000 site; another will propose a £40,000 one. Both might be perfectly reasonable responses to the brief, but they’re not comparable, and the process of evaluating them wastes everybody’s time.

Sharing a budget – even a range – allows agencies to design proposals that are realistic and properly scoped. It also filters out agencies who can’t work within your means, which saves time for everyone.

If budget is genuinely undecided, say so, but give a steer: “We are expecting this project to cost somewhere in the range of £X to £Y, and we are open to phased approaches if that helps manage the investment.”

9. Timeline and process

Cover when you’d ideally like the new site to go live, any fixed dates that affect the project (an anniversary, a funding announcement, a major campaign), who will be the day-to-day project contact on your side, how many people need to be involved in sign-off decisions, and how you’ll be selecting your agency (open tender, invited pitches, direct appointment).

Agencies need to know if they’re competing with ten others or two. They also need to understand your internal decision-making process – a charity where every decision goes to a full trustee board needs more lead time built into the timeline than one where the CEO makes the call.

If you know you’ll need an agency to support content production – writing copy, sourcing or directing photography, structuring information – say so. Many charities underestimate how much of a project’s timeline is absorbed by content (hint: it’s a lot, and we generally cover it as part of our projects).

A note on bespoke projects: your brief is the start, not the end

If you’re commissioning a straightforward website – a smaller charity that needs a solid, reliable presence without complex functionality – a well-written brief may be all the strategic work you need to do before an agency can get going.

But for more ambitious projects, the brief is really just the opening conversation. A good bespoke agency will take what you’ve written and run a deeper strategic process alongside you, facilitated workshops with internal stakeholders, audience research, content audits, navigation mapping, and sessions to surface the questions you didn’t know to ask in the brief. This is where a website project becomes a genuine piece of organisational thinking, not just a design exercise.

Our Scale-up Service is built around exactly this kind of strategic engagement. The brief you write gets us pointed in the right direction. The discovery process we run together makes sure we’re solving the right problems.

Before you send it out

Before your brief goes to any agency, read it back and ask: if I were an agency reading this for the first time, would I have enough to write a meaningful proposal?

The brief doesn’t need to answer every question. Part of an agency’s job is to bring expertise and ask the right questions back. But it should give a clear enough picture of who you are, what you need, and what success looks like that a good agency can respond with something genuinely tailored to you.