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The charity digital spend checklist: questions to answer before you commit a penny

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Charities get sold digital they do not need all the time. A website nobody can update. A system built by an IT company that fights the people using it. A review that comes back as a single useless page. None of it looks like a mistake on the day you sign. It looks like a mistake eighteen months later, when the money is gone and the problem is still there.

In a sector where every pound is scrutinised by trustees and funders, that waste is not just annoying. It is money that should have reached the cause. So before your charity commits to any digital spend, here are the questions worth answering first. They are drawn from years of doing this work with charities, and most of the expensive mistakes I have seen would have been caught by one of them.

Before you start

What are we actually trying to achieve here, in plain terms, before anyone mentions a tool or a supplier? If you cannot answer that in a sentence, you are not ready to spend.

Have we asked the people who will use this, whether staff or the people we serve, what they actually need? Not what we assume they need. The two are rarely the same.

What will we be able to do differently the day after this is delivered? If there is not a clear answer, you are buying a document, not a change.

Before you choose a supplier

Have we written down what we need before looking at a single product or demo? Get that order wrong and you buy a better-looking version of the same mistake.

Are we choosing on value and fit, or just on price? The cheapest quote that does not land wastes far more than the dearer one that does.

Have we run a fair, transparent process we could explain to a funder or the Charity Commission? This is not red tape. It is how you show you spent donated money responsibly.

While the work happens

Can our own team update and run this afterwards, without paying the supplier every time we change a word? A website you cannot edit is not an asset, it is a liability with a nice homepage.

Who owns this once the consultant or agency has left? If the answer is "nobody", it will rot.

Before you call it done

If we already use an agency, do their reports actually match the raw data? More than once I have found the reassuring monthly report was rosier than the analytics underneath it.

Is what we have built accessible to everyone we serve? For most charities, that is not a nice-to-have. It is the point.

What is the one number that will tell us, honestly, whether this worked?

Use it as a filter

You do not need to answer all of these perfectly. You need to notice which ones you cannot answer at all, because those are exactly where the money is about to leak. Take the list to your next board meeting, or your next conversation with an agency, and watch how quickly it sharpens the discussion.

If you would like a hand working through it, or a second opinion before you commit the budget, that is the part of this work I enjoy most, and as a charity trustee myself it is a table I have sat on both sides of.

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