What makes us a different kind of charity website agency?
Charity & Biscuits is run by Ben Blankley, who has spent over 20 years working both for charities — Comic Relief, War Child, and The Health Foundation — and since building websites and digital content with them.
Combined with our specialist copywriters and developers, we’ve got around 30 years of hands-on charity-sector experience between us. We’ve sat in your seat. We know the budget pressures, the trustee sign-offs, the “communications team of one” reality that many small and medium sized charities operate under.
1. We understand the charity sector
Any competent agency can build a website. Far fewer understand why charity websites are different: the tone, the funder and trustee expectations, the accessibility requirements, the donor journey, the platforms worth integrating with (and which ones to avoid).
We’ve worked inside the sector long enough to know what compelling charity content looks like, which fundraising and CRM integrations are worth the cost, and what statutory funders increasingly expect to see (accessibility being a big one — we build to WCAG 2.1 AA as standard).
2. You know who’s doing the work
Many agencies put a salesperson in front of you to win the project, then hand you off to an Account Manager who relays your requests to the people actually doing the work. Every handoff loses something in translation – and you don’t get to speak to the people actually doing the designing and building.
There’s no sales team and no account manager layer here. You work directly with Ben from the first conversation through to launch and beyond. What you ask for is what gets built — no Chinese whispers.
3. You will own your website
This matters more than most charities realise until it’s too late. Your domain, hosting, and content should belong to you — not be held by your agency as leverage. We’ve heard too many stories of charities having to pay to “free” their own content or being forced to pay exorbitant annual license/support costs because they don’t have any other options.
Everything we build is yours. Full admin access, your own domain and hosting, no ransom for your own data.
4. We build on a sustainable platform
We build almost exclusively on WordPress — open-source, no licence fees, and with a huge pool of developers worldwide if you ever need to move on from us. We avoid third-party page builders like Elementor or Divi that add an extra layer of complexity and lock-in; instead we build using WordPress’s native block editor, so your team can manage the site without learning two systems at once.
We’d be cautious of any charity digital agency offering a proprietary CMS, however polished the demo looks. If the platform belongs to them, then you’re locked into whatever future price or support quality they decide upon.
5. We’re the right size for you
We’re deliberately a small, virtual agency — not a large one in waiting. We can bring in trusted freelance designers, developers, and copywriters project by project (though most ones are designed and built solely by Ben), rather than carrying fixed overheads that need to be justified by taking on every job going. That means we pick projects we’re a genuinely good fit for, rather than as many as we can fit in.
If your team is one person wearing six hats (which it usually is), a large agency with layers of staff and formal project-management tooling can feel like yet another thing to manage. We aim to work the way you actually work.
6. We don’t add VAT on top
We don’t charge VAT, because we choose to stay under the threshold. That’s an automatic 20% saving compared with most agencies, who’ll quote you a price and then add VAT once you’ve signed.
7. We provide cost-effective support after launch
This is where most charities report being let down — not by the initial build, but by what happens afterwards: slow response times, being charged heavily for small changes, or being passed to a faceless support ticketing system.
Our ongoing support runs at around £100 per quarter for charities who want it — covering updates, backups, and the kind of ten-minute fixes we’ll just do there and then rather than logging, quoting, and scheduling. Because the site is built on open-source WordPress, you’re never locked into us for support, but most clients stick with us for the long run.
Who We’ve Worked With
Charity & Biscuits has been building charity websites since 2010, working with organisations across the UK — many are small charities just like yours. Most aren’t famous names, just dedicated people trying to make a big impact with a small budget and limited communications/marketing experience.
“People say when you find the right person you just know, and that is how it was with Ben. His insider experience with charities was invaluable.” — Liz, Parathyroid UK
“We received a few quotes from web developers, and Charity & Biscuits’ was not only the best value, but answered our brief far better than the others.” — Jem, Institute of Alcohol Studies
Fancy a chat?
If you’d like a short no-obligation conversation to see whether we’d be a good fit for your needs – or if you’d just like a second opinion on a brief you’re writing or proposal you’ve received – then please do contact me.