Hope for the Future is a small charity with a big remit. Just over a decade old, twelve people on the team, and a mission about helping more people get involved in the political decisions being made around climate and nature.

Last January they launched a new strategy: Their previous work had been good at reaching people who already had the time, the confidence and the headspace to engage with their MP. The new strategy goes further - It's about bringing in the voices most affected by climate change and least likely to be in the room when decisions get made. Diaspora communities, young people, families with disabled children. People who live with the everyday consequences of policy they've had no say in.

It's ambitious and the charity was the first to admit its website wasn't ready to carry it.

This is a story told across a handover as Laura led the rebrand and signed it off, then when she went on maternity leave, Jessica covered as interim CEO while the new site was built. Laura's now back and between them they've seen the whole thing.

A site built with generosity, then outgrown

The previous website had been with Hope for the Future for around three years, built pro bono by the developer behind their Climate Connect tool. It was a real gift, and it served the charity well.

The catch was in how it was built. It ran on a developer-led platform, which meant the team couldn't update it themselves. Every change had to go back through the person who'd made it. As the charity grew and the strategy moved on, a site they couldn't run themselves became the thing holding them back.

"It served us brilliantly for a long time," Laura said. "We just got to a point where we needed something we could actually run ourselves. Something that fits where we are now, not where we used to be."

It's not an unusual position to be in. Plenty of small charities have a site built for them pro bono in the early years that gets stretched further than it was ever meant to go.

From a quick fix to a full rebuild

The original ask was small. Help us learn how to manage what we've got.

It didn't stay that way for long. The more we looked at the site, the clearer it was that training wasn't going to fix the real problem. So after some thought, we offered to rebuild it pro bono. And with a new strategy already underway, a new site without a new brand didn't really make sense.

The project ended up being three things at once. A brand, a website, and a bigger shift in how the charity tells its story.

A team-led rebrand

Laura was upfront about the risk going in. Like most small charities, Hope for the Future is full of people who care deeply about what they do and have strong feelings about how it's represented. Try to drop a finished brand on a team like that and it usually doesn't end well.

What helped, she said, was that the early workshops weren't really about visual identity at all. They were about personality. The team got asked to describe who they were, how they sounded, what made them them. The brand came out of those conversations rather than being handed over as a finished thing to sign off.

"By the time we saw the actual look and feel, it felt like ours already," Laura said. "Which I genuinely didn't expect."

Picking it up midstream

By the time the website was being built, Jessica had stepped in as interim CEO and taken the project on.

Watching the site take shape in Figma had a similar effect, she said. It's not a tool the team would have come across otherwise, and being able to follow along as the site moved from rough sketches into real pages turned it from something happening in the background into something the charity could feel itself moving towards.

What the website actually needs to do

Now Laura's back, she's very clear about what's riding on the new site which is, in her words, the charity's biggest funding application. There are several major funders the team has been holding back from approaching until the new website is live, because the mismatch between the new brand and the old site doesn't tell the story they want to be telling right now.

It's also the launchpad for a new consultancy-style service the charity is offering to larger organisations, which will pay forward into grassroots support. And it needs to act as a proper resource hub. Toolkits, a new policy tracker (more on that one in a separate piece soon), and story-led content that puts the voices behind the work front and centre. The old site couldn't hold any of that. The new one has being built for it.

What pro bono actually felt like

For Jessica, the part she was keenest to be honest about was what pro bono actually felt like.

"We've never been treated like a pro bono client," she said. "The product, the people, the process, all of it has been the same as if we were paying full whack. That's really rare. I've worked with agencies before and you can usually tell when a project is the one that's being squeezed in around the paying work. Not here."

That was the bit that mattered to her most. The same studio, the same team, the same standard, regardless of what was on the invoice. Two hundred and forty hours of work from Col, Tom and the rest of the studio, treated as a proper client project from start to finish.

If anything about the experience ever felt 'pro bono' at all, Jessica was clear it wasn't coming from Few and Far's side. It was internal, on Hope for the Future's end. A reluctance to ask for clarity on timings, or to push for sign-off dates. A sense that, because no money was changing hands, raising those things felt ungrateful.

"That wasn't anything Few and Far did," she said. "It was me, in my head, not wanting to be the difficult one."

It's a fair point, and one we've actually built into how the new pro bono partner programme runs. We agree timelines up front now, with named owners on both sides, and we make it explicit at kick-off that the charity is allowed to ask about anything, anytime. The Hope for the Future project has been a brilliant one to learn from, and the feedback has shaped what comes next.

Where it leaves them

The new brand and website has now launched, and the team's left with a presence that's more accessible, more human and closer to the work they actually do.

"This stuff matters," Laura said. "When you're a small charity, your website isn't just a website. It's your front door, your funding application, your credibility, your whole shop window. Getting it right is genuinely transformative. And not having to find the budget for it, that just doesn't happen, normally."

If your charity is in something like the same position, an inherited site, a team that's outgrown it, a strategy the current platform can't carry, the Impact Optimiser is a decent place to start. It's a free digital review covering your website, accessibility, content and user journeys, and we'll walk you through a tailored report with the bits we think are worth tackling first.

A small charity, a big rebrand, and no budget involved