Donovan was born in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, England, Donovan grew up in nearby Tetney, in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire. Her father, Terry Donovan, was from Liverpool and played professional football, briefly representing the Republic of Ireland at international level
She attended the Humberston School.
Her late Irish grandfather, Don Donovan, also represented both Grimsby Town and the Republic of Ireland. He managed Boston United from 1965 to 1969. She has a younger sister, Kirsty.
She did a course in media at Franklin Sixth Form College in Grimsby, then studied for a Bachelor at De Montfort University in Leicester.
She returned to Grimsby to do a post-graduate Skillset Diploma in broadcast journalism at Grimsby Institute of Further & Higher Education in conjunction with East Coast Media. Donovan started her broadcasting career at the age of 14, presenting for Channel 7 Television (now Estuary television), a local cable television station based in Immingham.
She went freelance while continuing her studies and began freelancing for British Broadcasting Corporation Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in 2005 and joined the locally-based Propeller television a year later. After studying broadcast meteorology with the Met Office and the British Broadcasting Corporation Weather Centre, Donovan started presenting weather forecasts for the British Broadcasting Corporation"s regional television and local radio services in the Yorkshire and North Midlands, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and North East and Cumbria regions.
She is also a reporter for the regional current affairs magazine, Inside Out, and an occasional newsreader for the Leeds edition of British Broadcasting Corporation Look North.
In September 2015, she co-presented her first networked television series, the daytime factual show Break-in Britain, produced by British Broadcasting Corporation Cymru Wales.
