Digital strategy & consultancy

Digital strategy
for charities.

Only 44% of UK charities have a digital strategy, and giving fell by £1.4 billion in 2025. Narrative builds the plan that moves your charity forward: what to fix, in what order, and what to ignore. Then we help you deliver it.

There are six million fewer donors than a decade ago

People in need now ask AI first. Charities are seeing website traffic plummet, and those invisible to AI answers go unfound.

Only 8% of charities say their technology is well integrated, and just 30% get the most out of their CRM

Non-profits must now do more, with less.

Every one of them now takes more work to reach, more trust to convert, and better systems to keep.

Does this sound familiar?

  • “We know we need to do something with digital but we don’t know where to start.”
  • “We have a website, a CRM and an email platform, but they don’t talk to each other and nobody trusts the data.”
  • “Our team is doing their best but there’s no shared direction and everyone’s pulling differently.”
  • “We’ve had strategies before. They end up in a drawer.”

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.

What do you get from a Narrative digital strategy?

A prioritised, costed plan built around your real capacity. Every engagement leads to action:

  • A focused discovery. Structured conversations with the people who matter in your organisation. Clear priorities, not a list of everything that could theoretically be better.
  • A digital audit. Website, donation journeys, SEO and AI-search visibility, data and tools, assessed against one question: are people finding you, and acting when they arrive?
  • A sequenced roadmap. A clear order of moves with the reasoning behind each one, owners assigned, and realistic timelines.
  • Ongoing consultancy. Sense-checking decisions, pressure-testing supplier recommendations, and spotting avoidable mistakes early.

Start with Mission Ready

Mission Ready is our fixed-price discovery for charities that want to move quickly without a long commitment. In a few weeks you get:

  • A digital maturity assessment benchmarked against the Charity Digital Skills Report and Status of UK Fundraising data
  • A website, donation journey and search visibility review
  • A tech stack and data health review
  • A prioritised 90-day action plan with owners and effort estimates
  • A working session to hand it over to your team and leadership

Where does strategy connect to outcomes?

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:

  • Raise More. Donor journeys, retention, income. Two-thirds of giving is unplanned, and over £3.3 billion flows through charity websites and giving platforms each year (CAF UK Giving Report, 2026). Friction in that journey is lost income.
  • Reach More. Visibility, SEO, content, AI search. People who cannot find you cannot fund you.
  • 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.

What about AI?

of charities are now using AI
(up from 61% last year)
76 %
are worried about the implications
60 %
have reviewed governance to give trustees proper oversight
22 %

76% of charities now use AI tools, but only 2% use them at a strategic level, and 44% of boards rate their own AI skills as poor (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2025). AI readiness is a strand of every strategy engagement we run: which tools fit your organisation, what the data and safeguarding implications are, and how you stay visible and cited as search moves into AI-generated answers.

AI consultancy for charities →

Who has Narrative done this for?

  • WMUK, a rare cancer charity, doubled web traffic and is now cited accurately in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.
  • A health information charity lifted organic visits to priority topics by 36% after template and schema upgrades; enquiries from those pages doubled in three months.
  • Targeted form and messaging changes increased completions by 20% in twelve weeks.

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.

Frequently asked questions

What is a digital strategy for a charity?

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.

How much does a charity digital strategy cost?

Our engagements start with Mission Ready, an initial discovery and 90-day plan. Full strategy engagements are scoped after that, so you never commit to a large project before knowing what you actually need.

How long does it take?

Depending on the availability of your leadership team, Mission Ready typically takes a few weeks. A full strategy engagement runs longer depending on the complexity of your organisation. Roadmaps are sequenced in 90-day blocks so your team sees progress from the first quarter.

Our charity is small. Is this overkill?

No. Small charities feel the strategy gap hardest: 30% of small charities have no CRM at all (Charity Digital Skills Report, 2024). A strategy for a small charity is shorter and more selective, and matters more because there is less slack for wasted effort.

We've had a digital strategy before and nothing happened. Why would this be different?

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.

Start with a conversation, not a commitment

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.

AI can fake your charity’s voice & look. Content credentials are how you prove it didn’t.

Business needs to discuss the “C” Word

eCommerce at Creative Bedfordshire