I don’t sit in on projects. I’m not in the room when decisions get made or when a new design gets signed off. So when I get the chance to sit down with someone like Sara Bass, Director of Income Generation and Communications at Llamau, and just listen - it’s genuinely one of the highlights of what I do.

Llamau is a Welsh charity working to end homelessness for women and young people across Wales. It’s serious, important work. And when Sara and I spoke recently, what came across wasn’t just a client who was happy with a new website. It was someone who felt like something had genuinely shifted - for her team, for the people they support, and for how Llamau shows up online.

Their experience touches on a side of our working relationships that are rarely spoken about, so I wanted to write that story up properly.

A website that was getting in the way

Sara joined Llamau about two and a half years ago. One of the first things she noticed was the website. It had been built back in 2018 but already felt much older. It was restrictive, messy, and - perhaps most frustratingly - it made it almost impossible to track anything useful. Donor journeys, user behaviour, conversion data. None of it was accessible in any meaningful way.

“We couldn’t do what we needed to do,” Sara told me. “It was poorly written, disorganised, and even we struggled to find things on it. That’s not a great sign.”

The platform they were on wasn’t cheap to run, and the support that came with it was limited. Every change took effort. Every update felt like a project in itself. For a small communications team trying to run fundraising appeals, manage relationships with commissioners, and keep content relevant - it was a drain they couldn’t keep absorbing.

The decision to move wasn’t taken lightly. A website change requires time, resource, and budget - all things that are in short supply in most charity comms teams. But eventually, Sara said, they realised they had to do something.

Finding the right fit

Sara did what most people do when they’re looking for a partner - she researched, compared, and asked around. Some of the proposals that came back were eye-watering. “We had quotes coming in at around £100,000,” she said. “That wasn’t going to work for us.”

What she found with Few and Far was different, and not just on price. She’d come across an article we’d written for Media Trust - “Is your website working for you?” - and something about it resonated. When she visited our website, the information was clear. The process was straightforward. There was no chasing for a quote or waiting to find out what things might cost.

“I could see exactly what was on offer and how it worked,” Sara said. “That sounds simple, but it wasn’t what I found anywhere else.”

She got in touch, and from the first conversation it felt like a different kind of relationship. Col and Tom listened. They asked questions. They were interested in what Llamau was actually trying to achieve - not just what they wanted built.

Keeping the mission at the centre

One of the things Sara came back to several times in our conversation was how Col and Tom kept bringing every decision back to Llamau’s core mission: ending homelessness.

It would have been easy to get pulled in different directions. Llamau is a complex organisation. It works across the whole of Wales, with multiple service areas, different audiences, and a wide range of stakeholders - from the women and young people it directly supports, to commissioners, corporate partners, researchers, and internal staff.

“There were moments where people within the team wanted things on the website for all sorts of reasons,” Sara told me. “And Col and Tom would just ask - why? Is this for the people we support, or is this for us? That question changed a lot of conversations.”

Early in the project, Col and Tom ran audience profiling sessions and brought in wider voices from across Llamau - including Sam, the CEO, the HR director, an operational director, and the education lead. Getting those perspectives in the room early helped shape what the site actually needed to do, rather than what different people assumed it should do.

It wasn’t always comfortable. Sara is refreshingly candid about that. “They pushed back. Firmly. But it never felt difficult - it felt like they were on our side.” She described it as being “positively challenged,” which I think is one of the nicest things you can say about a working relationship.

One example that stuck with me: Llamau’s education team needed certain content available for neurodiverse young people who had experienced trauma - information that would allow them to research services and feel safe before making contact. That’s a legitimate and important need. But other content that had been earmarked for the public site turned out to really belong on Llamau’s internal intranet. Col and Tom helped the team separate those two things out, making the public site cleaner and more purposeful.

“Every piece of content had to justify its place,” Sara said. “And that was the right approach.”

What changed when the site went live

The new website launched alongside Llamau’s Christmas fundraising appeal - and the early signs have been encouraging. Preliminary data suggests the donor journey is significantly faster and cleaner, and that’s feeding through into higher conversion rates on donations. Sara is now in a position to actually track and analyse that data properly, which simply wasn’t possible before.

“The donor journey from landing on the website to the appeal is so much quicker,” she said. “We think that’s making a real difference.”

From restrictive platform to real results: Llamau’s digital transformation