How leading charities get enterprise websites without enterprise costs

What charity digital leaders tell us

Digital leaders want to:

• Launch quickly without sacrificing quality
• Focus budgets on mission-critical features, not rebuilding basic infrastructure
• Maintain strategic control over their digital future
• Avoid expensive vendor lock-in
• Avoid increasing subscription costs as the organisation grows

The market data backs this up. Charities are clearly cost-conscious - WordPress dominates at 20% market share in the charity sector (based on our analysis of the main CMS’ used by the top 71 UK charities) - but they're also increasingly concerned about the security vulnerabilities associated with using third-party add-ons.

The opportunity for us was clear: give charities the benefit of proven patterns from day one, without the compromises.

Ten years of investment in reusable foundations

We've been creating what we now call 'accelerator kits' for over a decade - comprehensive, pre-built website foundations powered by Wagtail CMS. This isn't a recent pivot. It's always been core to how we deliver projects.

Our kits eliminate tens of thousands of pounds of standard build work on every project - the basic functionality every charity needs but shouldn't have to pay to rebuild from scratch. Our projects launch approximately a month faster than traditional custom builds.

We chose Wagtail because it's open source. This means no licensing restrictions, no vendor lock-in, and you maintain complete control over your digital future. Initial development costs will be higher than a first-year SaaS subscription, but over a typical 3-5-year period, the total cost of ownership favours open-source builds as license fees compound annually.

Everything you need, ready to extend

Enter our latest accelerator kit: The Wagtail Charity Blueprint. It incorporates best practices from major charity builds, with patterns refined through projects with organisations like Samaritans, Oxfam, RNIB, and WWF USA.

It includes everything a modern charity website needs out of the box: essential page types for news, events, information and team profiles; flexible content building blocks; WCAG 2.2 AA and sustainability best practices; and complete navigation systems. Ready to extend with your specific requirements.

Your brand, your way

The Wagtail Charity Blueprint provides core functionality out of the box, not a cookie-cutter design or standard user interface. Each brand implementation is unique - colours, typography, layouts, visual identity are completely flexible. RNIB's Wagtail site demonstrates how these foundations can be themed to match a distinctive brand identity.

Built to integrate with best-in-class tools

Our kits are designed to integrate cleanly with specialist tools across your architecture: donation platforms like GoDonate and Fundraise Up, CRMs like Salesforce and Beacon, email platforms like Mailchimp, analytics tools like BigQuery, and AI capabilities for content assistance.

This gives you the best of both worlds: open source flexibility at your core and integration with best-in-class commercial tools for specific functions like donations and email. As our CTO Helen Warren writes, this "small pieces, loosely joined" approach means you can swap out components as better alternatives emerge without rebuilding your entire digital estate.

Getting better with every project

Our kits are constantly evolving. Each new project contributes learnings back to the shared foundation to help improve the next charity project. Recent improvements include adding dark mode to reduce a site’s carbon footprint by lowering energy usage and improving donation widget workflows.

Ready to build on solid foundations?

If you're planning a website replatform, our accelerator kits mean you can skip rebuilding the basics and focus your budget on what makes your charity unique.