How to Compare Australian Agencies for a Charity Platform Migration

A charity website migration can look fine on launch day and still go wrong a few weeks later, when the June tax appeal lands in supporters' inboxes and nobody has noticed that the new donation form stopped writing gifts back to the CRM. Or when volunteers can't log in. Or when the page a hospital has linked to for ten years starts returning a 404.

That's why comparing agencies for a not-for-profit platform migration is a different exercise from comparing them for a new build. You aren't really buying a website. You're buying someone's ability to move a working operation without breaking it. This guide gives you four criteria to score agencies against (migration risk, integrations, accessibility and sector fit), with the questions to ask and what good and weak answers tend to sound like. It won't tell you which CMS to choose. That's a separate decision, and ideally one you've made, or at least narrowed, before this one.

Key Takeaways

• Ask every agency to talk you through what happens to your donation form on cutover day. A vague answer here is the best early warning you'll get.
• Phasing lowers risk: move the integrations first while the old site stays live, then move the CMS.
• Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 the accessibility duty stays with your organisation whatever the contract says, so write the WCAG version (WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the current reference point) into the scope.
• No redirect map, no deal.
• Sector fit shows up in the questions an agency asks about your appeal calendar, your volunteers and your supporter data, far more than in a page of charity logos.

What's Actually at Risk When a Charity Changes Platform

Before you score anyone, write down what the current site does. Not what it looks like. What it does. For most not-for-profits the list includes some or all of these:

• Donation flows, including one-off gifts, recurring gifts and appeal-specific forms with their own tracking codes.
• Supporter and donor CRM sync, so a gift made online shows up against the right person, with the right consent flags.
• Member and volunteer logins, often tied to a separate database nobody has documented in years.
• The fundraising calendar. End of financial year and Christmas appeals, event registrations, awareness days. A cutover in the wrong fortnight costs real money.
• Search equity and inbound links from government sites, health services, schools and media, built up over a decade or more.
• Hundreds of pages of resources, fact sheets and policies, plenty of them PDFs, some of them referenced in printed material.
• Sensitive personal data about donors, clients, volunteers and sometimes vulnerable people.

Hand that list to every agency you're comparing. Their response to it tells you more than any pitch deck will.

How to Score Agencies Against the Four Criteria

Keep it simple. If I could score only one criterion, it'd be migration risk, because that's where the money gets lost. Give each agency a score from one to three on each criterion below, and weight the criteria to suit your situation. A small charity whose donations run through an embedded third-party platform can weight integrations lower. A federated organisation with thousands of member logins probably can't afford to.

1. Migration Risk

Ask: How would you sequence this? What gets frozen, and when? Who builds the redirect map? What's the rollback plan if something breaks in the first 48 hours?

A good answer talks about sequence before design. It includes a content audit (what's moving, what's being merged, what's being retired), a content freeze that's planned around your appeals rather than the agency's schedule, a redirect for every URL that carries traffic or inbound links, and a clear plan for the first week after launch. The strongest answers suggest splitting the riskiest work away from the visible rebuild.

A weak answer sounds like "we'll move everything across and tidy up after launch", or treats redirects as a job for whoever does your SEO later.

Phasing is worth asking about by name. Webcoda's Sydney Zoo migration from WordPress to HubSpot Content Hub ran in two stages: the ticketing integration came first, while the site stayed on WordPress, and the CMS moved second. Sydney Zoo isn't a charity, but the pattern transfers directly to donation and CRM integrations. Scale is the other test. The UTS College project moved a 1,400-page site to HubSpot CMS while preserving its design, which is the kind of HubSpot website development evidence to ask any agency for when your own resource library runs into the hundreds of pages.

Search visibility deserves its own line in the plan. Keeping URLs stable where you can, redirecting where you can't, and carrying over page titles and structured content protects your rankings, and it can also affect whether AI assistants keep citing your fact sheets (Webcoda covers that side under AI search optimisation).

2. Integrations

Ask: Which systems touch our website, and how will you test each one before cutover? Which side is the source of truth for supporter records? What happens to recurring gifts and in-progress registrations on the day we switch?

A good answer starts with an inventory. The agency wants to see every form, every API, every nightly export someone set up years ago. It talks about testing with realistic records in a staging environment, and it's precise about ownership: in many set-ups recurring gifts live with the payment gateway or donation platform, not the website, and a good agency will confirm that rather than assume it.

A weak answer is "there's a connector for that". Connectors exist. They still need mapping, testing and someone accountable when a field stops syncing.

Logins are the sleeper issue. Depending on how passwords are stored on the old platform, it isn't always possible to move them securely, which can mean every member or volunteer has to reset theirs. That's manageable with good communication. It's a disaster as a surprise. For a sense of what's involved, Webcoda's St Vincent de Paul Member and Volunteers Hub on Umbraco CMS keeps member details in a custom CRM, with an integrated user database handling login authentication and news and events personalised to each member's profile. On the marketing side, JMC Academy includes a Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration. If integrations dominate your list, Webcoda's systems integration page sets out that work.

3. Accessibility

Migrations are where accessibility quietly goes backwards. Alt text doesn't come across. Heading structures get flattened in the import. Form labels change. Legacy PDFs move untouched to a shiny new site, so the new site inherits the old problems.

Ask: Which WCAG version are you building to? How do you test, and does that include keyboard and screen reader checks as well as automated tools? What's your plan for our existing PDFs?

A good answer names the version. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the current reference point in Australian government guidance, but older contracts and policies still cite 2.1 Level AA, so make sure everyone is quoting against the same thing. A good answer also separates automated checks (useful, but they only catch part of the picture) from manual testing, and treats the PDF backlog as a scoping question rather than an afterthought.

A weak answer is "our templates are accessible". Templates are a start. Content entered by editors in the years after launch is where many new issues come from.

One thing no contract changes: the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 obligation sits with the organisation providing the service. That's you. An agency can build to the guidelines, but it can't take the duty off your hands.

4. Sector Fit

This is the criterion most easily faked. Plenty of agencies can show a charity logo. Fewer will ask, unprompted, when your end of financial year appeal goes out, who edits the site (often part-time staff, sometimes volunteers), or how consent is recorded against supporter records.

Ask: What do you need to know about our fundraising calendar? Who will be able to edit the site after launch, and how much training will they need? How will you handle supporter and client data during the migration itself, not just after it?

Good answers get specific about editors and data. The UTS College site was configured so non-developers could edit it, which matters enormously when your comms team is two people. On sensitive data, Webcoda's Metropolitan Memorial Parks work included security and compliance for sensitive family information, a close cousin to the care your supporter and client data needs.

Cost belongs here too. Licence fees come straight out of mission budgets, and JMC Academy moved from a costly CMS onto open-source Umbraco with significant savings. An agency that raises running costs before you do is usually thinking about your organisation, not just the build.

And be honest with yourself about scale. If your site is a modest brochure with an embedded donation page and no logins, you may not need an enterprise agency at all. A smaller studio that answers the migration risk questions well could be the right call.

Red Flags That Should Lower Any Score

• A launch date proposed before anyone has asked about your appeal calendar.
• No mention of redirects until you raise them.
• Integration testing scheduled for launch week.
• "We'll handle accessibility at the end."
• No clear answer on post-launch arrangements. Ask every agency what happens in the weeks after go-live, who you call, and how fixes are prioritised.

Where Webcoda Fits

Webcoda is a Sydney digital agency, founded in 2005 and a Certified B Corporation. It's an Umbraco Gold Partner, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico and a HubSpot Solutions Partner at Gold tier. Its Umbraco platform page describes CMS migrations from WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore or legacy platforms as "structured, low-risk migrations that preserve your content, SEO value, and editorial workflows".

Not-for-profit work includes Tresillian, whose Umbraco site brings together a Google Maps centre finder, events and ecommerce, and the St Vincent de Paul Member and Volunteers Hub, alongside work for CMRI and Jeans for Genes. Webcoda builds to the WCAG guidelines during design and development. More on that sector work is on the not-for-profit industry page.

Talk to Webcoda

Webcoda is a Sydney-based, B Corp certified digital agency that has been building websites and enterprise web applications since 2005, for organisations including Sony, BridgeClimb, the Australian Federal Government and NSW Health. We are an Umbraco Gold Partner, a Gold partner for Xperience by Kentico and a HubSpot Solutions Partner, so platform advice comes without a single-vendor agenda.

Get in touch to talk through your project, or browse our full range of services and platforms.