You have been asked to manage the website project. On top of everything else.
You are not sure what should go in a brief. You definitely do not have time to write a fifteen-page document. And you are probably the kind of person who has been handed this job because you are the most organised person in the building, not because anyone thinks you have done this before.
Here is the honest version: a good brief does not need to be long. Most briefs that run to fifteen pages contain three pages of useful information and twelve pages of hedging. A brief that genuinely helps an agency do good work for you needs to answer six questions. That is it.
Question one: what is this website actually for?
Not "to promote our work." Something more specific.
Is it to convert website visitors into donors? To help service users find and access your services? To support grant applications by giving funders somewhere credible to check you out before a meeting? To recruit volunteers?
A website can serve more than one purpose, but it needs a primary one. If you cannot write one sentence explaining what success looks like for this website, you will not be able to brief anyone meaningfully. Everything else in the project will drift without it.
Question two: who uses the website, and what do they need?
Think about the three or four types of people who visit your site. What do they need to find? What action do you want them to take?
Funders want to see credibility, impact, and financial transparency. Service users want to know whether you can help them and how to get in touch. Volunteers want to know what is involved and whether they are a good fit. Donors want to understand what their money does.
These different groups need different things from the same website. Knowing this before you start helps an agency build something that works for everyone, rather than something that tries to cover everything and ends up serving nobody particularly well.
Question three: what do you already have?
Content is almost always the thing that holds a website project up. Not design. Not development. Content.
Before you speak to any agency, do a quick audit. Do you have a logo in the right format? Photographs of your work? Existing copy you could use or adapt? Annual reports or impact data? A list of the pages you need?
Be honest about what you have and what you do not. An agency who knows upfront that you have nothing will structure the project accordingly, often including content support in their proposal. An agency who discovers mid-project that you have nothing scrambles. Timelines slip, costs creep up, and the person who gets blamed is usually whoever was supposed to provide the content.
Question four: what does good look like to you?
Three or four example websites you like are more useful than a paragraph trying to describe what you want. They do not need to be charity websites. They just need to illustrate something about the tone, structure, or feel you are going for.
Note what you actually like about each one. "I like how this site explains what they do clearly on the homepage" is useful. "I like the green" is less useful, especially if your own brand colours are completely different. The goal is to give the agency a direction to work in, not a site to copy.
Question five: what is the budget?
I understand the instinct to keep this vague. Many organisations think stating a budget will cause agencies to inflate their quotes to match it.
In practice, the opposite tends to be true. Without a budget range, agencies either quote a very wide range that is not useful to you, or they spend hours building a proposal they cannot actually price properly. Sharing a realistic budget range narrows the conversation quickly and helps both sides understand within ten minutes whether there is a genuine fit.
If the number feels embarrassing to say out loud, it probably means it is lower than what you want. That is also useful information. Better to know it now than three months into a project.
Question six: who has final say?
Name the person with sign-off on this project. If it is a committee, explain how decisions get made and how quickly.
Agencies need to make decisions during a project. If the answer to "can we proceed with this approach?" takes three weeks because a trustee board has to convene, you both need to know that going in. A good agency will ask this question. If they do not, it is worth raising yourself. Projects with unclear decision-making authority are the ones that drag on.
What to do when you have finished
A brief covering these six questions, written clearly, is enough to send to two or three agencies and get comparable proposals back. It does not need an executive summary, a history section, or a statement of values. Those go on the website.
Keep it under two pages. Send it as a PDF or Google Doc. Then judge the proposals on how clearly each agency has understood the problem you described, not on how impressive their portfolio samples look.
One thing no brief can fix
Whoever you choose, make sure there is one person inside your charity who is the single point of contact throughout the project. Not a committee who all give feedback separately. One person who can collect all internal notes, make decisions, and speak to the agency.
The projects that go well almost always have this. The ones that drag on usually do not. It is not about being organised. It is about giving the agency what they need to keep moving.
If that person is going to be you, clear some time in your diary before you start. The work is not constant, but when input is needed it is usually needed quickly. Building that expectation in before the project begins is much easier than trying to retrofit it later.
