So on 14 July we took a room at the Royal Armouries in Leeds and filled it with over thirty marketing and senior leadership people from charities, some of whom are clients, some of whom we've volunteered with over the years, and a few we've admired from a distance without ever having worked together. Five short talks, a debate, and coffee to power us all through.

Choice overload

I went first, on choice overload… Psychologist Barry Schwartz coined the term the “paradox of choice”, describing it as a phenomenon where an abundance of options can tip over into unhappiness and anxiety that leaves you unable to decide anything at all.

Restaurant menus provide a very real example of this, which is why seventy seven per cent of us will look at a menu before deciding whether a place is worth the trip (according to a survey reported by Restaurant Dive), and why a good menu is edited hard enough that you can make your mind up inside ninety seconds.

Charity websites tend to have the opposite problem, in that there is far too much rather than too little on the menu, and what there is has usually been arranged around the shape of the organisation rather than around whoever has just turned up.

Who that person is matters more than most allow for. Sometimes it's a high value donor and everything is fine but often it's a service user, who might be distressed, or in crisis, and who has landed on your site at eleven at night looking for one specific thing. They are not going to sit there patiently decoding a 15 item main menu on your behalf.

The fix isn't complicated - Offer people less to begin with, be specific about what you are offering them, and take them somewhere rather than leaving them to wander. Don’t forget, your audience can’t look at your menu before visiting your website (unlike a restaurant), so keep it clear and concise.

Leigh on the mentally healthy workplace toolkit

Leigh Staunton from Mindful Employer took the second slot, which was the talk I was most pleased about, because Leigh got to describe the work rather than us standing up and describing it for her.

She and her team came to us in 2025 about replacing their Ten Steps Toolkit, and it's worth saying this wasn't a rescue job, because the old site had served the Leeds network perfectly well for years. The problem was much subtler: Ten numbered steps get read as a sequence whether or not you meant them that way, and as we all know workplaces don't run in sequence.

Once we started pulling at it, other things came up. Accessibility needed rebuilding properly and now meets WCAG 2.2 AA. The language throughout described people rather than including them, and there were no real journeys through the content, nor much waiting at the end of them if you did make it through. The structure was rigid enough that the team couldn't change anything without ringing a developer, discoverability was poor, and the network itself was almost invisible on what was supposed to be its own website.

What's there now is organised as three themes rather than ten steps, each one can be picked up in whatever order suits. Running alongside it is an employer spotlight, so the good practice arrives attached to somebody's name and a real organisation instead of sitting there as theory, which I find is generally what kills a toolkit.

Megan on Google Ad Grants

Qualifying charities can get over £7,000 a month to spend on Google search advertising, they can't overspend it, and nobody ever asks them for card details. The budget is identical whether you're a team of two or a team of two hundred, which is rare enough in this sector that it's really worth saying out loud.

Megan's example was the Samaritans, whose grant campaigns bring in 10% of all their online donations, 11% of fundraising event registrations and 1,769 volunteer sign ups, according to their case study.

The reason charities lose these grants is that it isn't a set up and forget about it arrangement. You have to hold a 5% click through rate every month, log into the account at least once in that time, run live conversion tracking with at least one conversion actually recorded, and keep two active ads, two ad groups and two sitelink assets in place. Let those slip and the grant can go with them.

Megan's most useful point was about landing pages, which is that you should build pages matching the keywords and intent of the ad group they're serving, then noindex them, so what comes back in your reporting is your ad traffic and nothing else is clouding the picture.

The roundtable, sort of

We'd built this session around the Enthuse Charity Pulse report for 2026, which found that 77% of good causes maintained or grew their fundraising income in 2025, that nearly two thirds feel optimistic about the year ahead, and that around 69% put digital channels down as part of the reason for that optimism.

The room, it turned out, wanted to talk about something else.

Natalie from Simon on the Streets made the point that most sector events put you in a room full of corporates, where the job becomes selling your charity or at least starting a relationship that might turn into something later on. Sitting with thirty odd other charity people, none of whom wanted anything from them, was the part they found genuinely useful.

Leeds United Foundation, who aren't a client and who we'd invited simply because we like what they do, said much the same thing, which was that it was good to be out and about and that the sector ought to be doing more of this.

We let that conversation roll rather than dragging everybody back to the report, and I'd say the chinwag was the most popular item on the Town Hall running order.

Storytelling and impact

Tom and I closed the morning off with a keynote on storytelling and how it ties in to the impact charities make. The public picture is a good deal healthier than the mood in most comms teams would suggest too, given that charities in England and Wales spent £100 billion delivering impact in 2024, which is 5.4% up on the year before, while income grew by 5.6% to £102 billion (gov.uk).

Set against that, the charities we work with grew their income by around 24% on average over the same period. It's a sizeable gap, and I don't think it's explained by any of us being unusually clever.

What I do think explains it is storytelling, and not the soft, workshop version of the word. Ben Okri wrote that the fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease and at human imperfection, and that where there is perfection there is no story to tell. Maya Angelou was blunter, saying there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

What that amounts to in practice is fairly unglamorous, because it comes down to how you write your stories.

Don’t just show the people in your stories, but tell their story because that is what we resonate with as human beings. Telling an inspiring story can also inspire your audience to ‘write the next chapter’ by supporting your organisation in telling new stories.

Ask "unsure what ASL means?" rather than "what is ASL?", and then answer it in the words a worried parent would actually use at the school gate. Swap "we put people first" for the story of one person you helped, with their name on it and some sense of what changed for them. Give somebody two ways onward from your homepage instead of eleven.

There's a view I'll happily defend here too, which is that I'd rather read one genuinely inspiring charity story than an entire section of case studies all telling me the same thing.

None of us had really compared notes beforehand, and yet all five talks ended up in more or less the same place, which is that we should stop making people work it out for themselves.

We'll run another Town Hall next year of course. What I haven't decided is whether the talks are why people came or just the excuse they needed to get together as a sector and sit down with the people doing the work that matters, just like them.

FAQs

What is the Few and Far Town Hall?
A short morning of talks for UK charities, held in Leeds and run by invitation.

How much is a Google Ad Grant worth?
Qualifying charities can access over £7,000 a month of Google search advertising. Staying eligible means holding a 5% click through rate, logging in monthly, running live conversion tracking and meeting a minimum account structure.

Are charity fundraising incomes growing?
The Enthuse Charity Pulse report for 2026 found that 77% of good causes maintained or grew their fundraising income during 2025, with around 69% citing digital channels as a reason for their optimism.

How do I know if my charity website is getting in the way? Book an Impact Optimiser. It's free, it covers performance, accessibility, content and user journeys, and it will show you where people are dropping out.

What came out of our 2026 Town Hall