Digital Agency for Third Sector
Digital Agency for Third Sector
Before you can improve, you need to know where you actually are. A good audit doesn’t produce a report that sits in a drawer – it produces a clear, prioritised list of what to fix and why, so you can start moving in the right direction.
Most charities know something isn’t working. They’re just not sure exactly what, or where to start. An audit answers that question, quickly, specifically, and without requiring a long commitment upfront.
It’s the lowest-risk way to engage with us. You get an honest outside perspective on your specific situation, a prioritised set of recommendations you can act on, and a clear sense of what a longer engagement might look like if you want one. You’re under no obligation to take the next step with us, although many do, because the audit gives them the confidence to act.
It’s not a 60-page PDF. Nor a list of everything that could theoretically be better.
An audit from Narrative is a focused, evidence-based review of a specific area – the one most relevant to what you’re trying to achieve – with a practical output your team can use.
We look at what’s actually happening rather than what should be happening. We compare what we find against what good looks like for a charity of your size and type. We tell you what matters most, what can wait, and what can be fixed quickly. And we tell you the truth, even when it’s not what you were hoping to hear.
The output is a prioritised action plan. It’s not a wishlist, nor a strategy document, but a clear sequence of moves & adjustments with the reasoning behind each one.
Different problems need different appraoches. Here’s what we look at in each type of audit, and which outcome it connects to.
Where does your organisation sit on the digital maturity spectrum, and what’s holding you back?
We assess your strategy, systems, skills, data practices and leadership confidence against sector benchmarks. The average UK charity scores 5.1 out of 10 on digital maturity. Most know there’s room to grow. A digital maturity audit for charities tells you where to focus first.
Good for: organisations that want an honest overall picture before committing to a specific direction.
→ connects to Reach More and Help More
A thorough review of your website’s technical health, content structure, mobile performance, accessibility compliance and user experience.
We identify broken journeys, WCAG (accessibility) issues, slow pages, and content that isn’t doing the job you need it to to, with a prioritised fix list your development team (or ours) can work from.
Good for: charities whose website feels like it’s underperforming but aren’t sure why, and especially useful before creating a brief for a new website to avoid making the same mistakes.
→ connects to Reach More
How visible are you to the people who need you most? Can they find you in search results and, increasingly, in AI-generated summaries or LLMs?
We review your keyword coverage, content structure, technical signals, EEAT indicators and internal linking. For health, financial wellbeing and crisis support charities, we also assess how your content performs against the higher standards applied to sensitive topics.
Good for: charities that aren’t being found online, or know their search presence is weaker than it should be.
→ connects to Raise More
A focused review of your donation flow, campaign pages and follow-up sequences.
We look at where supporters drop off, what’s making mobile completion harder than it needs to be, whether your ask is calibrated to your audience, and what your stewardship looks like after the gift. Small changes here tend to move income faster than almost anything else.
Good for: fundraising teams who suspect their digital giving experience is losing them money.
→ connects to Raise More
For charities with online shops, we review the full retail experience from product presentation, checkout flow, mobile experience, fulfilment communication, and how shop data connects (or doesn’t) to your CRM and email platform.
We look at brand, conversion, products, opportunties in your data, and the gap between customers and supporters. We also look at retention which can cross over into other channels like email marketing.
Good for: charities running an online shop that isn’t performing as well as it should, or where the shop and the fundraising feel disconnected.
Every audit produces the same type of output, regardless of the specific focus: a clear, written set of prioritised recommendations, with the evidence behind each one, ranked by impact and by how quickly they can be acted on.
We distinguish between what your team can fix immediately, what needs external help, and what can wait. We don’t pad the output to look impressive; we make it as short and actionable as it needs to be.
Where relevant, we’ll also show you what a realistic next step looks like, whether that’s a specific piece of work, an ongoing engagement, or simply pointing you in the right direction to take it forward yourselves.
The Charity Digital Skills Report found that charities most want “consultancy to assess where we are and what next steps would have the biggest impact in a cost-effective way.”
That’s almost a word-for-word description of what an audit is for.
There are things you simply can’t see from the inside. Not because your team isn’t capable, but because familiarity is a kind of blindness. The donation form your team has looked at a thousand times is the one your supporters are quietly abandoning. The content that made sense when it was written in 2021 is the content that’s confusing people in 2025. The CRM that “mostly works” is the one creating hours of manual work every month.
An external audit breaks that familiarity. It gives you evidence, not opinion. And evidence is what changes minds, unlocks budgets, and gets things done.
A lot of what we do begins with a conversation about what’s frustrating you or what you’re trying to achieve, and we’ll suggest the right appraoch from there.
If you’d rather start with a broader picture before going deep on a specific area, a digital maturity audit can sometimes be the right place to begin.
Tell us what’s frustrating you or what you’re trying to achieve — we’ll suggest where to start.
→ Book a free 30-minute call
Not sure which specific area to focus on? A digital maturity audit gives you the overall picture first.