Digital Candle, run by digital marketing agency for the charity sector Platypus Digital, is a free service for charities who want advice on any aspect of digital or digital marketing. We talk to Matt Collins, managing director of Platypus Digital, about how the service has evolved, its impact and how to get involved.
1. How and why did you start Digital Candle?
It started with a statistic from the Lloyds Charity Digital Index years ago that nearly half of charity leaders didn’t see the value in digital. Alarming, but at the end of the day, charity leaders (like everyone else) don’t know what they don’t know. Charities aren’t struggling at digital because they lack intelligence or commitment, they are struggling because they lacked access to the right people, with the right knowledge and time to help them along.
I’d seen a lot of small charities doing brilliant work yet completely stuck on something a decent freelancer or agency staffer could solve in an hour. Meanwhile, the sector was full of generous digital professionals who genuinely wanted to help – they just didn’t have a route to do it. I thought Digital Candle could be the bridge.
So, I just set up two Google Forms – one for charities asking a question, one for volunteers willing to answer them. A charity submits a question, we matched them with a volunteer expert, they have a free one-hour call. No catch, no hard sell – just a friendly one-hour chat with good advice from someone who knows their stuff and wants to give something back.
It’s evolved beyond the Google Form setup, but the idea hasn’t changed.
2. How can charities get involved with Digital Candle?
Really easily! If you’re a charity that needs help with something digital, just head to digitalcandle.org.uk and submit your question. No question is too broad or too niche. We’ll match you with a volunteer expert and make the introduction by email. From there, it’s just a video call.
We’ve now made over 2,000 matches, covering everything from Google Ad Grants and CRM selection to social media strategy and digital fundraising.
3. What do you look for in volunteers?
Generosity and friendliness, more than a perfect CV. The charity doesn’t need the world’s leading expert – they need someone who will listen, understand their context, and give them something genuinely useful to act on.
We’ve found that volunteers who are slightly less senior can even be the most effective because they’re closer to the day-to-day realities and can explain things without jargon.
We have over 800 volunteer experts on the books now, covering almost every area of digital. If you work in digital, data or design and you want to give something back to the sector, we’d love to hear from you. One hour, once in a while. It makes a real difference.
4. What have you learned from charities’ most common queries?
A few things stand out. Google Ad Grants comes up constantly – charities know they should be using it but find it baffling, and the gap between what it could do for them and how to realise that potential is often huge.
CRM questions are super common too – charities outgrow spreadsheets and don’t know where to start with choosing a proper system.
Deeper than that, we often see that the question charities ask isn’t always the question they actually need answering. Someone will ask about their website, and what emerges in the call is a much bigger conversation about their content strategy, or their overall marketing strategy, and the fact that no one in their organisation feels confident owning any of this.
That’s the huge value of an outside perspective – someone with no agenda, just an hour to think with you about the root of the issue.
5. What should the sector be doing to support more charities with digital?
Stop treating digital as a one-off project and start treating it as core infrastructure.
Too many funders still won’t fund improving digital capacity in everyday ways. Too many boards don’t have anyone who really understands how integral it is to all operations. Too many charities are expected to somehow become digitally capable without any investment in the people or skills to make that happen.
I’d also love to see more digital professionals in the sector thinking of pro bono support as a normal part of their practice, the way lawyers and accountants do. The expertise exists – it’s just not flowing to where it’s needed.
Initiatives like Digital Candle are one way to change that, but it shouldn’t be down to one agency to hold the whole thing together. Funders, infrastructure bodies, tech companies – there’s a much bigger role for all of them to play.
6. What are your plans for Digital Candle in 2026?
We’ve hit over 2,000 matches now, which feels like a milestone worth celebrating – but it’s also a prompt to think about what the next stage looks like. We want to reach more charities who’ve never heard of us (which is still the vast majority of them), particularly smaller organisations as they are often the ones who’d benefit most and are least likely to know help is available.
I’m also thinking about how Digital Candle evolves in an AI world. The questions charities are bringing to us are shifting – AI, automation, how to use tools like ChatGPT effectively and safely – and we need to make sure our volunteer pool reflects that.
We’re also not immune to those investment challenges ourselves. Keeping the tech and marketing going at the level it should is tough going.