Charities, CICs, Nonprofits, and more often juggle small teams, tight budgets, and urgent workloads. A well-structured automation approach removes repetitive admin, speeds delivery and keeps sites up to date. The result? Your staff and volunteers spend more time on impact and less on formatting, uploads and chasing content.
Below are three practical automation steps I use with my clients that deliver reliable results: a Content Bank, a connected CMS workflow, and automated analytics reporting.
Content Bank
Your hub for website and marketing content.
Why it helps:
A Content Bank centralises every piece of content you’ll need for a site: copy, images, staff bios, project descriptions, PDFs, event details and more. Your staff and volunteers will agree: this is gold. Your team often work in different areas and collaborations, so forms and categorisation reduce friction and missed assets. Bonus - not only does this work well for website content, it works great for a marketing team/employee, so they have a place to get content for your latest campaign.
How I build it:
I use Airtable because it combines a spreadsheet interface with a simple database, flexible views and easy-to-build forms. Imagine Excel and Google Workspace had a baby, you'd get Airtable.
Key elements to include
- Separate tables or bases for: Pages, Staff Members, Projects, Events, Media (images/docs), Testimonials and Fundraising Campaigns.
- Custom fields: page location (which page the item belongs to), status (draft/ready/approved), contributor name, alt-text for images, suggested headline, publish date, and tags/categories.
- Forms: build one form per category (e.g., “Add a staff member”, “Submit project”) and share links with the relevant people.
- Views: filtered views for reviewers (e.g., “Ready for review”) and for developers (e.g., “Images needing optimisation”).
Operational benefits
- Role-based entry: team members can fill only the forms relevant to them, keeping responsibilities clear.
- Faster design fit: having real content up-front lets you design pages around actual copy and images, not placeholders. This avoids later redesigns.
- Ongoing content capture: the Content Bank becomes a live resource to add to as the organisation grows, and it’s useful beyond the build (press teams, newsletters, reports).
Tips to reduce friction
- Pre-fill examples in forms so contributors see the expected length/format.
- Use required fields for essentials (image, alt text, brief bio) to reduce follow-ups.
- Add a short editorial checklist field (e.g., “Has this been proofread?”) to reduce editing cycles.
CMS (Content Management System) Automation
Design once, publish many times. Works great with the Content Bank!
Why it helps:
A good CMS workflow turns repeated page builds into instant pages. For nonprofit sites, this matters: campaign landing pages, project posts, and staff profiles often share a visual pattern. When you design a flexible template once, content from the Content Bank can populate it automatically, and the site stays consistent.
How I use it:
For Webflow projects, I create CMS Collections for each content type (Staff, Projects, Events, Testimonials). Instead of copy-pasting, I connect new Airtable records into the corresponding Webflow collection. New entries arrive as drafts, so I review, optimise images and publish. A process of adding new content pages now takes minutes instead of hours!
Typical workflow:
- Create a Collection template in Webflow for each content type.
- Design the page once with dynamic fields (name, role, image, project summary, full description, tags).
- Use Zapier to connect Airtable → Webflow so new records create draft items in the CMS.
- Review drafts, crop/optimise images, set SEO fields, then publish.
Automation Setup with Zapier:
Zapier is an online tool used for connecting apps, software and more. You can create automations based on the activity of these tools. In this case, New additions to the Content Bank are being sent to your site.
- Create accounts: Zapier, Airtable base (your Content Bank) and your Webflow project with CMS Collections prepared.
- In Zapier, create a new Zap:Trigger: Airtable — “New Record” (choose the table and a view like “Ready for Webflow”).Action: Webflow — “Create Live Item” (or “Create Item” if you want it unpublished; I choose “Create Item” and set a draft status).
- Map fields: connect Airtable fields (title, body, images, tags, page slug) to the corresponding Webflow CMS fields.
- Test: create a test record in Airtable and confirm a draft item appears in Webflow.
- Add steps (optional): Automatically send an email to a member of staff to review and publish new content sent to your CMS.
Notes and safeguards:
- Start with drafts: always route new items into draft state so your team can check tone, accessibility and image sizes.
- Field validation: in Airtable, use required fields to avoid incomplete records reaching the CMS.
- File handling: images often need optimisation and correct alt text. Before publishing, make sure to click the handy "Compress Assets" button on the CMS panel. This is under the "..." menu. Saves time on the tedious task of compressing all the images.
How my Clients benefit:
- Clients update content via simple forms without touching the site builder.
- Faster turnaround for campaign pages. What used to take hours can be ready in minutes once the content exists.
- Consistency in layout and messaging improves user trust and donations.
Google Analytics
Measure, automate, report.
Why it helps:
Publishing is just the start. Impact depends on how people interact with the site. Automating analytics setup and regular reporting gives teams insights without manual data extraction, letting them react faster to underperforming pages or successful campaigns.
Basic setup steps I use:
- Head to the Google Analytics page and run through the quick and easy setup. Google takes you through this.
- Part of this setup is copying a bit of "tracking code" and pasting it on your site. For Webflow, under each page's settings, paste the code in the "Inside <head> tag". This lets Google track the performance on each of the pages you paste the code.
- Wait a couple of days for traffic to come to the site and Google to start collating the data on your analytics page.
- Now you can set up key events: donation button clicks, form submissions, campaign landing page visits, and newsletter signups. Anything that you want to keep improving on.
How to Automate Website Reports:
- Analytics includes several templates for reporting data such as user behaviour, sales, engagement and more. Choose whichever suits you best!
- From there, you can now set up monthly or weekly automated emails to you and your team so you can monitor progress. See what's working and what needs to be improved upon.
- Add alerts: set notifications for sudden drops in traffic, low form submissions, or conversion spikes so the team can act.
Why I include this step in all my Website Projects:
- Instead of manually pulling reports, clients receive a consistent snapshot automatically.
- Regular reports support evidence-based fundraising and content choices.
- Tracking events from the start gives data that informs future design and campaign decisions.
Conclusion
If you can try just one thing this month, set up a simple Content Bank form for a single content type (staff or projects) and link it to a CMS collection. It’s a low-effort change that proves the value of automation: better content gathering, faster page builds and a simpler handover for volunteers.
Need a hand getting this work started? I'm happy to help!
Feel free to book a call with me here - https://calendly.com/hello-ryandeandesigns/30min