Digital Agency for Third Sector
Digital Agency for Third Sector
UK charities lost £1.4 billion in giving in 2025, and 2.8 million people cancelled a regular donation (CAF UK Giving, 2026). There are six million fewer donors than a decade ago. Every one of them now takes more work to reach, more trust to convert, and better systems to keep.
Source: UK Giving Report 2026
Source: UK Giving Report 2026
Source: Gov.uk 24/25
Source: VCSE Barometer Survey April 2026
Source: Patient Information Forum
Source: Status of UK Fundraising 2026
UK charities lost £1.4 billion in giving in 2025, and 2.8 million people cancelled a regular donation (CAF UK Giving, 2026). There are six million fewer donors than a decade ago. Every one of them now takes more work to reach, more trust to convert, and better systems to keep.
Most charities are fighting that battle without a plan. We fix that. A Narrative digital strategy tells you what to fix, in what order, and what to ignore. Then we help you deliver it.
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Because the cost of drifting has never been higher, and the sector’s own data proves most charities are drifting. The Charity Digital Skills Report has tracked this for years, and the 2025 picture is blunt:
Here is the number that matters most. Digital maturity explains 23% of the variance in income growth among UK nonprofits, second only to organisation size (Status of UK Fundraising, 2026). You cannot change your size. You can change your maturity, and the organisations that do are significantly more likely to report growing income.
A digital strategy is how you close that gap on purpose instead of by accident.
We hear these in almost every first call. None of them means your charity is failing. Each one means effort is being spent without direction, and that is fixable in weeks, not years.
You get a prioritised, costed plan your team can actually deliver, built around your real capacity. We are a digital consultancy, and everything we produce leads to action. Depending on where you start, an engagement includes:
A focused discovery. Structured conversations with the people who matter in your organisation. We arrive with good questions, and leave you with clear priorities rather than a list of everything that could theoretically be better.
A digital audit. A forensic look at your website and accessibility, donation journeys, SEO and AI-search visibility, content, data and tools, assessed against outcomes: are people finding you, and acting when they arrive? Visibility is shifting into AI-generated results, and we measure you there too.
A roadmap, sequenced for your capacity. A clear order of moves with the reasoning behind each one, owners assigned, and realistic timelines. Not a 60-page PDF.
Ongoing consultancy. Some organisations want the plan and the confidence to run with it. Others want a steady hand alongside them: someone to sense-check decisions, pressure-test supplier recommendations, and spot avoidable mistakes early. We do both.
Mission Ready is our fixed-price discovery for charities that want to move quickly without a long commitment. In [X weeks] you get a prioritised picture of your digital health, scored against the sector benchmarks above, and a 90-day action plan your team can start on immediately.
What’s included:
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Strategy earns nothing on its own. What it does is make sure that when you invest, you invest in the right things, in the right order, with the foundations in place. We anchor every engagement to three outcomes:
[Linked block] → Raise More. Donor journeys, retention, income. Two-thirds of giving is unplanned, and over £3.3 billion now flows through charity websites and giving platforms each year (CAF UK Giving, 2026). Friction in that journey is lost income.
[Linked block] → Reach More. Visibility, SEO, content, AI search. People who cannot find you cannot fund you.
[Linked block] → Help More. Beneficiary journeys, accessibility, service delivery.
A strategy engagement usually settles which of these is your right first priority, and what has to be true (data, integrations, team confidence) before real progress is possible on any of them.
AI is the clearest example of the sector adopting technology faster than it adopts strategy. 76% of charities now use AI tools, but only 2% use them at a strategic level (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2025). Only around one in five have updated risk registers or governance to cover it. 44% of charities say their board has poor AI skills.
That gap now carries regulatory weight. The Fundraising Regulator’s first guidance on AI in fundraising (December 2025) makes trustees accountable for their charity’s use of AI, requires human oversight of AI-generated content, and applies even when the AI is used by your agencies and suppliers rather than by you.
AI readiness is a strand of every strategy engagement we run: which tools fit your organisation, what the data and safeguarding implications are, how AI is changing the way people find you, and how you stay cited and trusted in AI-generated answers. Practical, without hype and without fear. See our AI consultancy for charities.
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We have spent over 30 years doing this in commercial environments where performance is ruthlessly measured, and in the third sector, where budgets are tight and the stakes are human. We know the difference between digital that looks good and digital that does good.
A digital strategy is a prioritised plan that connects a charity’s digital activity (website, data, fundraising tools, content, AI) to its mission outcomes. It states where the organisation is now, where it needs to be, and the sequence of steps between the two. A useful one fits your team’s actual capacity and gets reviewed, not shelved.
Our engagements start with Mission Ready, a fixed-price discovery and 90-day plan, at [£X]. Full strategy engagements are scoped after that, so you never commit to a large project before knowing what you actually need. [Publish the number if at all possible. Price transparency is rare in this market and filters out poor-fit enquiries.]
Mission Ready typically takes 6 weeks. A full strategy engagement typically runs 12 to 16 weeks depending on the availability of a charity’s leaders. Roadmaps are sequenced in 90-day blocks so your team sees progress from the first quarter.
No. Small charities feel the strategy gap hardest: 30% of small charities have no CRM at all (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2024), and small organisations at the earliest digital stage have grown every year since 2022. A strategy for a small charity is shorter and more selective, and matters more because there is less slack for wasted effort.
Because we build the plan around your capacity and hand it over with owners, timelines and a working session, then stay available while you deliver it. Strategies end up in drawers when they describe an idealised organisation. Ours describe yours.
[Photo of named person]
Hi, I’m Alec, Founder & Digital Strategist at Narrative. Most of our engagements start with a free 30-minute call. You tell us about your organisation and what’s stuck. We tell you honestly whether we can help, and we’ll point you in the right direction if we can’t.
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Narrative Industries is a specialist digital consultancy for charities, CICs and purpose-led organisations. Based in the UK. Working remotely and on-site.