Your charity doesn't need a volunteer web designer. It needs a digital budget.

We've noticed something happening more and more: a charity or CIC puts out a call for a volunteer web designer or developer. LinkedIn is full of these ‘job roles’.

And we get it. Charities rely on volunteers and there are some brilliant people out there who willingly donate their professional skills to causes they care about.

But then you read the description.

• They need someone to redesign the website

• Improve the user experience

• Make it work properly on mobile

• Sort out the SEO

• Improve accessibility

• Set up forms and integrations

• Deal with hosting, domains and security

• And perhaps provide some ongoing support afterwards

At some point, we have to ask:

Is that really a volunteering opportunity – or is it a professional digital project that hasn't been given a budget?

This isn't about having a go at charities

Let's make it clear - we work with small charities and non-profit organisations, so we know that budgets are tight. There is never enough money and there are always competing priorities.

And spending thousands on a website can feel like an enormous investment when you're trying to make every pound deliver as much impact as possible.

We also think volunteering is brilliant & do as much as we can at Web Goddess.

But we think there's an important distinction between someone choosing to donate their professional skills to an organisation and an organisation relying on free professional labour because digital hasn't been properly budgeted for.

Those aren't quite the same thing.

A charity website isn't just marketing

This is perhaps where some of the problem starts. Websites still have a tendency to sit under "marketing".

But think about what your website actually does. It might:

• help someone find support

• take referrals

• tell a family how to access your services

• recruit volunteers

• collect donations

• allow professionals to download resources

• promote events or training

• demonstrate your impact to prospective funders

And it might be the first place somebody goes to decide whether your organisation is trustworthy enough to contact.

For many charities, the website isn't simply promoting the organisation. It's part of how the organisation operates.

That's digital infrastructure. And digital infrastructure needs investment.

Small charities are already struggling with digital

This isn't just something we're seeing ourselves.

The Charity Digital Skills Report found that 78% of small charities surveyed were at an early stage with digital, while only 22% had a digital strategy in place.

That's important. Because if digital is dealt with reactively – when the website breaks, somebody leaves or something suddenly needs replacing – finding a volunteer can become the emergency solution.

We'd rather see digital considered earlier.

What will we need over the next few years?

Who is responsible for it?

What happens when that person leaves?

How much will it cost?

And how are we going to fund it?

So should charities stop using volunteer web designers?

Absolutely not! There's a really valuable role for skilled digital volunteering.

A volunteer might help you:

• work through a particular technical problem

• understand your options

• populate content into an existing website

• upload news, events or resources

• improve the digital skills of your team

• provide mentoring or specialist advice

• bring digital expertise to your board

• undertake a clearly defined piece of work

In fact, NCVO actively points charities towards organisations providing volunteer digital and technology support.

The issue isn't volunteering. It's what we're asking volunteers to be responsible for.

There's quite a difference between:

"Can you give us some advice about improving our website?"

and:

"Can you take responsibility for our website strategy, user experience, design, development, accessibility, SEO, hosting, security and ongoing technical maintenance?"

Our rule of thumb would be:

Volunteer expertise should add capacity to your organisation – not routinely replace professional work that should have been funded.

The hidden cost of a "free" website

We've taken over enough websites over the years to know that the original cost isn't the only cost that matters.

Sometimes nobody knows where the domain is registered.

Nobody has the hosting details.

The person who originally built the website disappeared three years ago.

Nobody knows how to update it.

The contact form hasn't been working since 2024.

Important software hasn't been maintained.

There isn't any documentation.

SEO wasn't considered.

Accessibility wasn't considered.

And everybody is terrified of touching anything in case they break it.

That isn't necessarily because a volunteer did a bad job.

A professional can build a terrible website too - we've rescued plenty of those over the years!

The bigger problem is that nobody planned for what happens after the website is built.

Who owns everything?

Who maintains it?

Who gets trained?

What happens when members of staff or volunteers leave?

Who deals with security?

What's the plan when the organisation changes?

A website should never depend entirely on one person. Paid or unpaid.

A professionally built website doesn't have to mean a £30,000 project

The smaller charities we work with typically invest somewhere between £5,000 and £15,000 in a new website, depending on what it needs to do.

That's still a significant amount of money. But there are ways to make that budget work harder.

You might pay professionals to handle:

• strategy and user journeys

• website structure

• design

• technical development

• accessibility

• complex functionality and integrations

• SEO foundations

• testing and launch

Then staff or volunteers might help with:

• populating articles

• transferring resources

• adding events

• uploading team profiles

• sourcing photographs

• reviewing content

• ongoing news and updates

And importantly, the project should include training so your organisation isn't dependent on the people who built it.

That gives you professional expertise where you need it while building digital capacity within your own organisation. And it's exactly how we like to work with all of our clients.

What if your trustees don't understand why a website costs that much?

There's another part of this conversation that can be difficult to talk about: trustees and digital knowledge.

Trustees have an important job. They're responsible for protecting the charity, questioning expenditure and making sure money is being spent appropriately. They absolutely should challenge a proposed £5,000, £10,000 or £15,000 website project.

The problem comes when the decision is being made by a board that doesn't have enough digital knowledge or experience to properly assess what it's being asked to approve.

If your experience of websites is that they're essentially a few pages of information on the internet, £10,000 for a new one probably does sound ridiculous.

"Surely someone can just build us a website?"

"My nephew does websites."

"Could we find a volunteer?"

"The existing website looks fine to me."

We've heard variations of all of these.

But the conversation shouldn't really be about whether £10,000 is "a lot for a website". It should be about what the organisation needs that website to do.

If people need it to find your services, make referrals, access support, donate, volunteer, book activities or find important resources, then you're not simply buying some nicely designed pages.

You're investing in one of the systems through which your organisation delivers its work.

And that requires a different conversation.

Trustees don't need to become web designers

We don't expect trustees to understand how websites are coded, how Google indexes pages or how different integrations work. They shouldn't need to.

But boards increasingly need enough digital understanding to ask the right questions.

• What problem are we trying to solve?

• Who needs to use this website?

• Is the current website preventing people from accessing our services?

• What are the risks of doing nothing?

• How long should this investment last?

• What ongoing costs will there be?

• How will we measure whether it has worked?

• How will staff manage it afterwards?

• Could some elements be delivered by staff or volunteers without compromising the project?

Those are governance questions, not technical ones.

"We can't afford it" and "we don't understand its value" aren't the same thing

A charity genuinely not having £10,000 available for a website is a real financial constraint. That's very different from having the money – or potentially being able to fundraise for it – but deciding digital isn't worth investing in because nobody at board level understands why it's needed.

And this is where digital skills at trustee level become important.

If nobody on your board understands digital, that doesn't mean you immediately need to recruit a web developer as a trustee.

It might mean bringing in an independent specialist to explain the options, giving trustees some basic digital training, recruiting a trustee with broader digital experience when you next have a vacancy, or simply mean making sure staff are given the opportunity to properly explain the operational case for investment rather than presenting the board with a line that says:

"New website – £10,000."

Because we'd probably question that too.

Give trustees a business case, not a website quote

Instead of asking trustees to approve a new website, show them:

The problem: What's currently not working?

The impact: Who is affected and what does that mean for your organisation?

The proposed solution: What will actually change?

The cost: What is included and what will the ongoing costs be?

The alternatives: Could you repair the existing website? Phase the project? Use staff or volunteers for some elements?

The risk of doing nothing: What happens if you leave things as they are for another two or three years?

The expected outcome: What should be easier, faster, safer or more effective once the project is complete?

Now the board isn't being asked whether it thinks £10,000 sounds expensive for a website. It's being asked to make an informed decision about investing £10,000 to solve a defined organisational problem.

That's exactly the sort of decision trustees should be making.

And if charities are going to become more digitally capable, digital understanding needs to reach the boardroom as well as the people updating the website.

Why aren't we budgeting for this in the first place?

This is the bigger question.

If you're applying for funding to deliver a new service and people will discover or access that service through your website, shouldn't the digital infrastructure be part of the cost of delivering it?

If you're creating a resource library, shouldn't building the online resource library be in the budget?

If you're expanding your organisation and the existing website can no longer support what you're doing, shouldn't improving it form part of the growth plan?

NCVO's own guidance on preparing grant budgets includes websites among the marketing costs organisations may need to consider.

Its digital funding guidance also suggests charities consider website hosting, external digital support, software upgrades and developer support when calculating digital and technology costs.

Some major funders also explicitly recognise organisational and technology costs. The National Lottery Community Fund, for example, allows eligible programmes to include things such as training, overheads and technology or IT improvements.

So, the answer shouldn’t automatically be:

“We can’t possibly fund that.”

Sometimes the better question is:

“Could we have included this in the funding in the first place?”

Funders have a role in this too

We don't think this responsibility sits entirely with charities.

If organisations are expected to demonstrate impact, reach more people, deliver services digitally, collect information securely and make services accessible, then the infrastructure required to do those things needs to be recognised as a legitimate cost.

Digital isn't free just because you can't see it.

Websites need building.

Systems need maintaining.

People need training.

Technology needs replacing.

And specialist expertise costs money.

These are normal costs of running a modern organisation.

Before advertising for a volunteer web developer, ask these questions

Before posting that advert, it might be worth asking:

Is this genuinely a volunteering opportunity or are we describing a professional role?

• How many hours of work are actually involved?

• Would we normally expect to pay somebody with this level of expertise?

• Is there specialist or high-risk work involved?

• Who will be responsible for the website when the volunteer leaves?

• Who owns the domain, hosting and other accounts?

• Who will maintain what they build?

• Do our staff have the skills to manage it afterwards?

• Could volunteers help with some elements while professional specialists handle others?

And, perhaps most importantly:

Could this work be included in a future funding application?

We need to start funding charity websites properly

Perhaps it's time to stop starting with:

"Can we find someone who'll do our website for free?"

And start with:

"What digital infrastructure does our organisation need to achieve its aims, and how are we going to fund it sustainably?"

That doesn't mean every small charity needs an expensive website.

It doesn't mean volunteers shouldn't contribute their skills. And it certainly doesn't mean throwing money at technology for the sake of it.

It means understanding what you actually need, budgeting realistically and using professional expertise, internal staff and volunteers in the places where each can provide the most value.

Because small charities deserve good digital infrastructure too.

And good digital infrastructure shouldn't depend on getting lucky enough to find somebody willing to build it for nothing.

Need to work out what your charity actually needs?

If you're planning a new website but don't know where to start, talk to us before deciding what you need to build.

Web Goddess works with smaller charities and non-profits to plan and build websites typically ranging from £5,000–£15,000, with strategy, training and long-term manageability considered from the start.

We can also help you identify which parts of the project need professional expertise and where your own team or volunteers could get involved.