What charities should ask a web agency before signing anything

Commissioning a charity website? These are the questions that reveal whether a web agency truly understands the non-profit sector, before you sign.

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Most charity website projects don't go wrong at launch. They go wrong two years earlier, in a pitch meeting, when nobody asked the awkward questions.

The portfolio looked great. The price was right. But the agency had never touched Donorfy, hadn't tested with a screen reader since 2019, and disappeared once the invoice cleared. Now the site needs rebuilding and the budget's gone.

If you're commissioning a website, often without a technical person in the room, the questions below will tell you far more than any showreel.

Why the pitch stage is where projects quietly fail

The 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 30% of charities rate their systems and databases as poor or non-existent, and 39% say the same about their website and analytics data. That's not because charities don't care. It's because the things that make a website genuinely work, like integrations, accessibility and editor experience, are invisible in a pitch deck.

Agencies show you what's easy to show: visuals. The questions that follow force a conversation about everything else.

"Have you worked with our CRM?"

Your website and your supporter database need to talk to each other. When they don't, every donation, sign-up and event booking becomes a manual job, and supporters slip through the cracks. Nearly half never engage again after a first gift.

So ask directly: have you integrated with Hubspot? Donorfy? Salesforce? Beacon? A sector specialist will have war stories. A generalist will say "we can look into that", which usually means you're paying for their learning curve.

Ask to speak to a client whose integration they built. Five minutes on that call is worth more than fifty pages of proposal.

"Show me your accessibility work, not your accessibility statement"

Every agency says they build accessible websites. The WebAIM Million report found that 94.8% of the top million homepages still have detectable WCAG failures. Somebody isn't telling the whole truth.

For charities, this isn't optional polish. Your audience is more likely to include disabled people, older people, and people in crisis on old phones with patchy signal. Yet only 28% of charities treat accessibility as a top priority, which means it's on you to make your agency prove it.

Ask how they test. If the answer is "we run an automated checker", press harder. Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. You want to hear about manual testing, keyboard navigation and screen readers, and ideally testing with real users.

"Who updates the site once you're gone?"

Here's an uncomfortable pattern: agencies build sites that only agencies can edit. Every news story, every campaign page, every amend becomes a support ticket. It's a business model, and you're the one funding it.

Your content team will live in the CMS every day. Ask to see the editing experience before you sign. Not the designs, the actual admin screens. Can a non-technical person add a page, update the donation appeal, publish a news story? If the agency won't show you, that tells you plenty.

This is a big part of why we build on Craft CMS and Webflow: both give your editors real control without a developer on speed dial.

"What happens in year two?"

A website isn't finished at launch. That's roughly when the real work starts. Ask what support looks like after go-live, what it costs, and how quickly things get fixed. Ask who owns the code, the design files and the hosting account. The answer should be: you.

Then ask the question almost nobody asks: "If we left you in two years, how hard would that be?" A confident agency answers honestly, because they plan to keep you through good work rather than lock-in.

The questions that separate specialists from generalists

None of this requires technical knowledge. You're not testing the agency's code. You're testing whether they've solved your problems before. Which CRMs have you integrated? How do you test accessibility? Can we see the CMS? What do we own? What does year two cost?

A charity specialist will enjoy these questions. A generalist will improvise. You'll know the difference within ten minutes, and it might save you a rebuild.

Thinking about a new site? You're welcome to put every one of these questions to us, and any others, before you commit to anything. Let's talk.

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