Accessibility Panel
Customise your platform experience and notification preferences.
The help is already there. Finding it is the hard part.
Every town has people running food banks, youth groups, warm rooms and support of every kind. Community Switchboard is where you find them, and where they get found. Free to look, free to be listed.
Pick the one that sounds like you.
I need a hand with something
Start with the thing you need
You do not need to know any charity by name. Pick what it is about and we will show you who does it.
No account, no cost, no questions. We do not keep a record of who looked at what.
I run something, or help run it
A proper website, and people able to find you
Free, and it stays free. No developer, no hosting bill, no card, and nothing to keep updated afterwards.
I fund or commission this kind of thing
See what a place has, and what it has not
Real organisations, checked, and a picture of what is on the ground. Whole areas onboarded in one go.
Charities, grassroots groups and community organisations across the UK are already on here.
The support exists. Most people just cannot find it.
Every town in the UK has somebody running a food bank, somebody running a mentoring scheme, somebody running the sort of thing that quietly changes how a year goes for a family. They are doing it right now, often within walking distance of the people who need them most.
Finding them is harder than it should be. Search engines put national brands above local groups. Social media buries a post before the right person sees it. Old directories still list places that shut years ago. And the organisations themselves rarely have the time, the money or anyone technical to keep a website going.
So you get a quiet sort of exclusion. The service exists. The person needs it. The connection breaks somewhere in the middle.
That is the bit we are fixing.
You might be one of these. All of you are welcome.
The month has outlasted the money. Food, the electric, a school uniform, a bill that has started to frighten you.
You are looking after somebody. A parent, a partner, a child who needs more than school can give. You are fitting it around work.
You are new here. New town or new country, and everyone else seems to know where things are.
The house is quieter than you would like. A group, a class, a walk, a warm room, a shed. Wanting company is a perfectly good reason to look.
You find things for other people all day. Social prescribers, housing officers, school pastoral staff, GP reception, advice workers, food bank volunteers. Look on their behalf and send it on.
You are ready to give something back. The same place that helped you find support will help you volunteer, find work, or learn something. Nobody has to stay on one side of it.
What we will not ask you
Your name. Your circumstances. Why you need it. There is no account and no cost, and nothing you look at is sold, shared or kept against you.
Three steps, and you can stop at any of them.
Pick the sort of thing you need
Start with a category rather than an organisation. Food, health, housing, children and families, education, leisure, and twenty odd more. Every one is written to mean what it says.
Narrow it with the tags underneath
Each category opens up. Health goes down to mental health, dementia, counselling, hearing loss and the rest. Social welfare goes down to food banks, loneliness, bereavement, community transport. Pick the one closest to you and the list gets shorter.
Look at who they are, then get in touch
Every organisation has its own page, written by the people who run it, saying what they do and how to reach them. Phone, email or their website, whichever suits you.
Also worth a look:
There is nothing here for what I need
Tell us what you were after and where you are. We chase organisations to get themselves listed, and we pass the gaps to the councils and funders who work with us.
If getting online is the problem in the first place
You can look on somebody else's behalf and hand them the details on paper or by text. Later we are adding help by phone and by text message, in more than one language, and printed local directories for the places nothing else reaches.
We built this for somebody very specific. See if it is you.
- There are between one and ten of you, most of you unpaid, and the website is one of about eleven things you are supposed to be looking after.
- The person who built your website left years ago and nobody who is still here can change the opening times.
- Your website is a Facebook page, because that is the one you could keep up with.
- Your donors are in a spreadsheet, your volunteers are in a different spreadsheet, and the receipts are in a shoebox.
- A funder has asked you to evidence something you have been doing brilliantly for years and never wrote down once.
- You came here to help people, not to wrestle with software, and every hour on the laptop is an hour not doing the actual thing.
You are also writing the bids, chasing volunteers, keeping on top of safeguarding and running the actual service. A website that works is not optional any more. Building one usually is not possible. That is the barrier we have taken away.
You probably do not need us if you already have someone whose job is your website and a database that works. Take the free listing anyway. It still puts you in front of people looking for what you do.
Four steps, and nothing to install.
Each one says what happens, and what to do if you get stuck.
Make an account and tell us who you are
An email address and a password. No card details, ever, on the free plan. Type your organisation's name in and we will find your charity or company registration and fill in what we can. Charities, CICs, community groups, PTAs, scouts and guides, faith groups and groups that are nothing official at all can all sign up. Add the rest of your team later, so you do not need everybody round the table.
I am not the official contact. Start anyway. Nothing goes public until somebody with the authority says so, and you can hand the account to a trustee or manager in one click.
Ours is wrong, or we are not registered anywhere. Every box can be edited by hand, and "we are not registered, we are just a group" is a perfectly good answer. If your registration is very new it might not show up yet. Type it in and we will match it later.
Connect Stripe, if you want to take money
Optional, and easy to skip. Connecting Stripe means you can take donations, ticket sales and Gift Aid where you qualify, from the moment you publish. If now is not the time, add it whenever you like and nothing else changes.
We have never taken online donations before. Then this is the easiest it will ever be. Stripe handles the card details, we handle the Gift Aid declarations, and the money goes to your account rather than through us.
Build your site and tag yourself properly
Drag the sections you want into the order you want them, add your words, add a logo and a photo if you have them. No code, nothing to break, no template to fight with. Every design we offer meets WCAG 2.2 AA, because we do not offer one that does not. Mobile first, because that is what people will open it on.
Then pick your categories, and take your time over it. This is the single thing that decides whether people find you. Pick every one that genuinely applies, including the beneficiary groups you work with, and go down to the specific tags rather than stopping at the top level. A food bank tagged only as social welfare will be missed by somebody looking for food banks.
I do not know what to put. There is a real example under every box. Or paste in an old leaflet or your Facebook wording and we will tidy the formatting. You can change any of it after you go live, tags included.
We have already got a website. Send us the address and we will move the content over, then help you point your existing web address at the new one. Nothing goes down in the middle.
Press publish
Your site is live and you are in the public portal there and then, findable by anybody browsing the categories you have picked. Put your events and your vacancies up whenever you like and they appear on the events listing and the job board.
What do we have to keep on top of? Nothing. No hosting bill, no updates, no renewal, no rebuild further down the line. Log in when something changes and forget about it when it does not.
Worth having to hand
None of it is compulsory and all of it can be added later.
- Your charity or company number, if you have one. We fill the rest in from it.
- One sentence on what you do. "We run a food bank on Tuesdays and Fridays" will do.
- Where you are, and where you cover.
- A phone number or email that somebody answers.
- A logo and a photo or two. Photos off a phone are fine.
- Bank details, only if you want donations working on day one.
If you would rather not do it on your own
Book a call and we will build it while you talk us through what you do. Phone or video, whichever suits. Bring a colleague or a trustee if that helps. It is free and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Everything below is on every plan, including the free one.
Your own site
Mobile first, accessible layouts, and a simple dashboard telling you who is looking. Switchboard branded on the free plan, your own branding from Basic upwards.
A listing in the public portal
Your organisation, in the national index, found by people browsing the categories you have tagged yourself with.
Events
Put what you have got on up on the events listing, where people are already looking for something to go to.
Job board
Paid roles and volunteer opportunities, on your own site and on the national board at the same time.
Donations and Gift Aid
Stripe Connect, so you can take donations and ticket sales from the day you publish, with Gift Aid where you qualify.
Resources
Everything other organisations have worked out and written down, free to read. Add your own when you have something worth passing on.
The builder
Drag, drop, publish. No code, and nothing you can permanently break.
Here is where we have got to.
We would rather tell you what is not finished than let you find out. Nothing gets charged for before it works.
Working now
Your site and the builder, your listing in the public portal, browsing by category, the events listing, the job board, resources, donations and Gift Aid.
Coming, with dates
- Q3 2026Searching by where you are, and by how far you can travel
- Q3 2026Supporters and donors in one place, with a nudge when a regular giver stops
- Q3 2026Newsletters, and social posts scheduled in one go
- Q3 2026Help with the writing: bids, funder reports, trustee papers, starting from what you have already done rather than a blank page
- Q4 2026Opening times, access needs and languages, shown on listings and filterable
- Q4 2026Funding that suits you, found for you, with the deadlines flagged
- Q4 2026Volunteers, rotas, DBS renewals, and hours recorded against the grant paying for them
- Q4 2026Impact reporting, recruitment, and a shared grant board
- Q4 2026Maps for funders and councils showing where there is nothing
- 2027Card readers, stock, and a shop
- 2027Sharing resources between organisations, campaigning together, and finding help by phone and by text, in several languages, with printed directories
You know who applied to you. You do not know who did not.
You cannot see the group that closed last year, or the estate that has never had anything, or the organisation doing the exact work you are trying to buy that has never written a bid in its life. Community Switchboard builds that picture without piling more reporting onto the people you fund.
- Organisations with their registration visible, tagged against a recognised classification
- A view of what a place actually has, by category, and where the holes are
- Whole districts onboarded in one go, rather than one form at a time
- Numbers about the sector that are counted, never traceable to a person
Nothing about the people being supported ever leaves the organisation supporting them. That is how the system is built, not something we promise in a policy.
Paying more gets you more to do. It never gets you further up the list.
Everybody stays findable, whatever they pay or do not pay. Prices are without VAT.
Free
Working now£0
and it stays that way
Your Community Switchboard branded site, your listing in the public portal, events, jobs, donations and Gift Aid.
Start freeBasic
Working now£10 a month
or £100 for the year
Everything in Free, with the Community Switchboard branding off, your own web address, full control of how it looks, somewhere to keep your photos, training and shared resources, and more fundraising tools.
Choose BasicCore
Opens Q3 2026£25 a month
plus £15 per person on the team
Everything in Basic, plus help with the writing, supporter records, newsletters and social.
Let me know when it is readyPlus
Opens Q4 2026£59 a month
plus £10 per person
Everything in Core, plus funding search, impact reporting, staff and volunteers, timesheets, recruitment, card payments and the shop.
Let me know when it is readyEnterprise
from £1,000 a year
Several sites, more governance, and someone on the end of the phone. For federations and bigger organisations.
Talk to usProgramme
for funders and councils
Everybody in an area, onboarded together.
Talk to us about an areaYou will not be charged for anything before it works. Changing plan is one click. Everything you put in comes back out whenever you want it, in full, for nothing, with no form to fill in and no exit fee.
If people cannot find help, the help might as well not exist.
49%
of disabled people say bad accessibility has put them off donating online.
Charity Times
71%
of disabled customers give up on a website that is hard to use.
Click-Away Pound Report
3.8 million
people in the UK have not got the digital skills for everyday life.
UK Government, Digital Inclusion Action Plan
2.8 million
have no internet at all.
Ofcom, Digital disadvantage in the UK
Every site we publish meets WCAG 2.2 AA as it comes, not as an upgrade. The whole thing is built for people who are not confident online and teams who have not got a spare evening. Later we go past the web altogether, with voice navigation, help by text message, more languages, and something that still works when the connection does not.
#NoCommunityLeftOffline is our campaign to make sure rural and left out places are not written off by infrastructure built somewhere else.
Read about the campaignWe are not a software company that noticed charities.
Community Stack is based in Barnsley. We run 18 communities and more than 100 events a year for over 25,000 members, and we have spent years doing the unglamorous end of it: chasing venues, chasing speakers, chasing the one person who knows the wifi password. Community Switchboard is the same job, done for the third sector.
The same system runs both. Whatever we build for a national conference ends up underneath a food bank, because it is one platform and we are not going to run a worse version of it for people paying nothing.
Ethan Sumner
Co-founder and chief executive
Community organiser and technologist from Barnsley. Years of building technology at Microsoft, Mastercard and the big consultancies, and years of running grassroots meetups across Yorkshire, showed him the same thing over and over: the groups with networks and funding did well, and the groups doing equally important work without them quietly disappeared. Community Switchboard exists to close that gap.
Where the name comes from. It is named after Ethan's Nana, who worked the switchboards in Barnsley for British Telecom and Central Call, putting people through to each other by hand. Same job now, different equipment.
What we promise, in plain words
- Your information is yours. Take all of it, whenever you like, for nothing. No form, no notice, no exit fee.
- The people you help stay private. Their details never leave your organisation. Anything we say about the sector is counted, never traced back to a person.
- Nobody can buy their way up the list. There is no paid placement here and there never will be.
- Accessibility is not an upgrade. Every design meets WCAG 2.2 AA on the free plan, and the screens your volunteers use are as accessible as the ones the public sees, because volunteers have access needs too.
- No quiet lock in. We are not tied to one supplier for any part of this, and nothing you put in is ever used to train anybody's AI.
Sumner Development Operations Group Ltd, company number 14730903, VAT registered, Barnsley, South Yorkshire.
Things people ask
Is it free, or free for now?
Free, and staying free. Your website and your listing are free on every plan, permanently. We pay for it through the paid plans, the bigger organisations, and funders who put whole areas on at once. Not by charging you to be visible.
We are not a registered charity. Can we still join?
Yes. Charities, CICs, community groups, PTAs, scouts and guides, faith groups, and groups that are nothing official at all. Your listing says what you are, so people know what they are dealing with.
Nobody here is any good with computers.
If you can fill in a form, you can do this. Nothing to install, nothing to host, nothing to update. And if you would rather not, book a call and we will do it with you.
How do people actually find us?
By the categories you tag yourself with. Somebody picks food banks, or dementia, or youth groups, and gets everybody who has tagged themselves that way. So tag yourself properly and go down to the specific ones, not just the top level.
Can people search by where they are?
Not yet. Right now the portal is organised by what organisations do rather than where they are. Searching by area is next on the list.
Do we have to take donations through you?
No. Stripe is optional, the money goes to your account rather than ours, and you can publish without ever turning it on.
What if we want to leave?
You take everything with you, for nothing, and we delete what is left.
Who do we ring when something goes wrong?
Us. Real people, in Barnsley, by phone or email.
Two ways in, and both start now.
If you need something, pick the category closest to it and see who is out there. No cost, no account. If you run something, get yourself listed. Free, and it stays free.