We don’t really shout about it, it just gets done. But one of those donations led somewhere we weren’t really expecting at all.

A small donation, but a bigger conversation

1% for the Planet works a bit like a directory. Environmental nonprofits sign themselves up, businesses like ours pledge a slice of their revenue and donations flow through the platform. It’s pretty simple, and a really good idea.

In 2024, we sent a donation through to Hope for the Future, a charity that helps people get more involved in political decision-making around climate and nature. Jessica got in touch to say thank you, which led to a virtual coffee so they could put faces to names and find out a bit more about each other.

That coffee ended up being mostly about their website. They’d inherited it from someone who’d supported the charity for years, and over time it had become a bit of a beast to look after. They couldn’t do updates themselves, every tweak had to go back through the original developer, and the whole thing was holding them back more than it was helping. The kind of position a lot of small charities end up in, and one we’ve heard about plenty of times.

Where our donation stopped being the main thing

After the coffee, Tom had a follow up call with their team to talk through the website properly. They’d already started thinking about what it would cost to make changes to the existing site, and were ready to pay for the work to be done.

We said no. Not because we didn’t want to help, but because we genuinely didn’t think it was worth their money. The platform wasn’t the right fit for an organisation of their size and stage, and patching it would have meant spending real budget on something that still wouldn’t do what they needed it to do. It felt wrong to take payment for fixes that, however well done, weren’t going to solve the actual problem.

So we offered to rebuild the site for them, pro bono.

One thing worth being clear about: this isn’t a 1% for the Planet project. Our donation through the platform was just a donation. The pro bono work came out of a conversation that probably wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been on the platform in the first place, but the two things aren’t the same. We mention that because it’s how a lot of good stuff actually starts for us, sort of sideways, not from the thing you thought it would come from.

A few months in, their Interim CEO Jess came into post, and things shifted again. A new site without a new brand didn’t make a lot of sense, so we ended up doing both.

What pro bono looks like, honestly

Hope for the Future is the fourth charity we’ve worked with on this basis. St George’s Crypt, Voice Collective and Get Together Through Gaming came before. Let’s Talk About Loss is the one we’re excited to be on with this year.

The HFTF project has taken just over 240 hours of studio time so far. Brand workshops, design, build, strategy calls, the lot. We’re not flagging that to look good about it. We’re flagging it because pro bono is one of those phrases that can mean almost anything, and we’d rather be specific. For us it’s the same team, same process, same standard as anything else we do.

Why we do it like this

We haven’t cracked some clever model here, and we know plenty of agencies do this kind of work, often really well. The only rule we’ve stuck to is that whoever we’re working with gets actual studio time, not the scraps. One charity a year, real capacity, no quiet expectation that it’ll convert into paid work later.

Pro bono is also part of our voluntary commitments as a B Corp, which feels worth saying. Not because the badge made us do it, we were doing this kind of work long before we got certified, but because being a B Corp means writing those commitments down, holding ourselves to them, and being measured against them. It puts real commitment behind something we’d be doing anyway.

We’re still working bits of this out as we go, and the HFTF project has taught us a lot about what works and what we’d do differently next time.

A couple of things we’ve learned

A year and a half in, with the new website just launched, two things really stand out.

First, pro bono has to be treated like a real project or it falls apart. Scope, milestones, named people on both sides. Without that you get drift, and drift has the potential to make everyone feel awkward.

Second, the charity has to feel like they can push. Jessica, HFTF’s Interim CEO, told us the only bit of the project that ever felt ‘pro bono’ to her was her own reluctance to chase us when things slowed down. She didn’t want to be the ungrateful one. That landed quite hard, actually. Next time round we’ll be saying it up front, this has a timeline, so of course let’s hold each other to it.

The 1% isn’t really the point

Donations are a starting point… What we’re more interested in is what comes after. The conversations, the partnerships and the projects that just wouldn’t have existed if we’d sent the money and moved on.

We’ll soon open applications for our next pro bono partner. One charity, twelve months, our full studio. If that sounds like it might be you, keep your eyes peeled for details soon on who it’s for, what it covers and how to apply.

We donate 1% of our revenue. Sometimes that’s just the start.