Most charity fundraisers we speak to think about their donor journey in terms of emails, asks and thank you letters. The bit that happens on the website (the donation) often gets treated as someone else’s problem.

In short, it’s not.

The journey from landing on a website to completing a donation is entirely within your control, and for a lot of charities it is quietly costing you. Not in a way that shows up dramatically in a single campaign that leaves you wondering what went wrong, but consistently, across every appeal you run.

This is a story about what happened when one charity fixed it.

The problem nobody was tracking

When Sara Bass joined Llamau as Director of Income Generation and Communications, the website was the thing everyone quietly tolerated. It had been built in 2018 but felt older. Tracking data was almost impossible. The donor journey was clunky. Sara and her team could not easily see what was working, what was losing people, or where donations were dropping off, and that is a hard position to be in as a fundraiser.

The platform was expensive, the support was poor, and making changes required external help that took time and budget to organise. So the team put up with it, which from our experience is what small comms teams tend to do when the alternative feels too big to tackle.

What the rebuild was actually for

When Llamau came to us, the brief was not primarily about their fundraising. It was about their beneficiaries: women and young people experiencing homelessness across Wales. People who needed to find help quickly, without confusion, without dead ends.

We kept bringing the team back to that. When colleagues came to project meetings with requests, pages they wanted to add, content they felt should be on the site, we’d ask why. 

Is this for someone in crisis who needs to find support fast? Or is it really for internal use? If it’s the latter, it’s another conversation.

That discipline, keeping the site structured around the people it was actually for, turned out to matter for fundraising too. A site built for clarity is a site that works for donors as well as beneficiaries. The same things that make it easier to find a helpline make it easier to complete a donation.

What changed

The donor journey from landing on the site to completing a donation became significantly faster and cleaner after the rebuild. Llamau’s Christmas appeal launched alongside the new website. 

Nothing much else about how the campaign ran changed, and they saw a 13.7 per cent increase in income and a 27 per cent increase in donors compared with the year before. They can’t prove the website was responsible. What they can say is that the old one wasn’t, and this is the appeal that followed it.

Sara is now in a position to track and analyse that data properly throughout the year, which simply was not possible before. That visibility changes how you make decisions about campaigns when you can see where people are dropping off, test changes, and build on what works and of course what doesn't.

For the internal team, the day-to-day experience of maintaining the site changed too. Sara, who had no prior experience of back-end content management, can now update a page without waiting on external support. Ashley, the digital manager, has been able to improve fundraising content that had gone live in a hurry at launch and keep it in good shape between campaigns.

When updating your own website feels like a chore, you put it off. Fundraising pages that nobody has touched since they went live are a familiar problem for most orgs, but that stopped being the case for Llamau.

‘The new website made a huge difference to how we approached and delivered the campaign. The look and the storytelling were so much better than we'd had before, which gave the appeal a stronger, more cohesive feel. It let us communicate impact more clearly and bring the campaign to life in a way that felt engaging for donors.’ 

Maisy Knight, Individual Giving Manager, Llamau

The thing worth taking away

Llamau did not rebuild their website to improve their fundraising. They rebuilt it because their beneficiaries deserved a better experience. The fundraising improvement came from the same decision: a site that is clear, fast and built around the people using it.

If your donor journey is sitting on top of a website that was never really designed for either donors or beneficiaries, that is worth paying attention to. Not as a project, necessarily, but as a question. When did you last look at what happens between someone landing on your site and deciding whether to give?

Want to learn more about website accessibility and fundraising? 

If you’re interested in fixing your website’s accessibility issues, please join our next free webinar for the SOFII community on 3 December 2026. It’s called: ‘The Fundraiser’s Guide to Accessible Giving’

You can find out more and register for your free place here.  

IMAGES: ©Llamau