A month into working with City Renewal Foundation, the thing worth reporting isn’t a strategy document. It’s a website that went live on 5 October.
About three weeks from the review call to launch.
Who they are
City Renewal Foundation is a registered non-profit working in Johannesburg across food security, community agriculture and family support. It started in December 2024 with a children’s Christmas party and has grown considerably since.
What we’re doing
Three areas, over twelve months to August 2027: digital strategy, fundraising, and the organisation’s public profile as an NPO.
The website was the critical path and it came first. Every campaign now has its own page rather than a line on a summary list: Pack the Pantry, Wednesday Ministry, the Paddle Tournament, the Christmas Community Market. Each one ends with a clear next step, whether that’s donating, volunteering, registering or sponsoring. Payments run through a dedicated provider, so no card details touch the Foundation’s site. A LinkedIn page went up in September alongside it.
Who actually did the work
We want to be precise about this, because it’s the most interesting thing about the month.
The build, the wireframes, the forms, the payment provider setup: the CRF team did all of it. We reviewed, flagged what was missing and wrote copy. They shipped it.
There’s a version of this work where the agency builds everything and the client inherits a site nobody internally understands. It looks more impressive on delivery day and it falls over within the year. This wasn’t that, and it wasn’t that because the Foundation chose to keep its hands on the work.
The same pattern has held across the month. Decisions come back quickly. Things that get assigned get done, and usually before we chase them. Publishing has been picked up by people inside the organisation rather than routed back through us. For a plan that runs another eleven months on no budget, that matters more than anything we could have written into it.
We’ve been in this business long enough to know that the first month tells you most of what you need to know. The CRF team put a new site live inside three weeks and did the work themselves. That’s commitment you can’t manufacture from the outside.
Pearl Mokgatle, CEO, Liyana Impact Advisory
What comes next
Campaign pages for the rest of the programme, a privacy policy and POPIA notice for the site, and the giving path moving from functional to properly set up for recurring donors. Then the festive season, which for an organisation like this is the busiest stretch of the year.
No impact figures from us until the Foundation’s own numbers reconcile to one agreed set, and no photographs of the people CRF works with until consent is documented. Those are the two things worth being slow about.
Liyana Impact Advisory works with South African businesses on digital strategy, fundraising, and building organisational profiles. If you are about to rebuild something, the useful question isn’t who can build it fastest. It’s who will still be maintaining it in a year.
