A website for a nonprofit

Three audiences, three routes

Somebody who needs help is in a completely different state from somebody considering a donation. A homepage written for donors can make a site unusable for the people it exists to serve.

Give each audience its own clear route from the first screen. Get help, support us, volunteer. Plain words, obvious placement, and no requirement to understand your structure.

The mistake is blending them into one message about the mission. That reads well to a board and poorly to somebody in difficulty at eleven at night.

Board members and funders are a fourth audience, and they mostly want documents. Give them a page with your filings, your annual summary and your governance details rather than scattering those through the site.

Write for the person who needs help

Plainly, and at a reading level that works under stress. Somebody in a crisis does not parse policy language, and they do not know your internal terms for your own services.

Say who is eligible, what happens when they contact you, what it costs and how long it takes. Uncertainty is the barrier, and every uncertainty removed makes it likelier somebody asks.

Our page on writing for a website covers plain language generally, and it applies here more sharply than anywhere else. It is also what lets an answer engine describe your services correctly.

Say plainly what you cannot do as well. An organization that names its limits, and points to who does handle those cases, saves people a call and earns the trust of everybody it refers on.

Accessibility matters more here

Organizations serving the public are often reaching exactly the people most affected by an inaccessible site, and the expectation on a nonprofit is correspondingly higher.

Funders increasingly ask about it too, which turns an ethical point into a practical one. Our accessibility checklist covers the work in a sensible order.

The basics carry most of the benefit: real headings in order, alt text that describes images, forms with labels, adequate contrast and everything reachable by keyboard.

What the site has to contain

The list below covers what donors, beneficiaries and funders each look for. Missing items here produce lost donations and, more importantly, people who needed help and did not ask.

• Who you help and who is eligible
• What happens after somebody contacts you
• Who runs the organization, named
• How money is used, in plain figures
• Your registration details and status
• How to donate, volunteer and get help, separately
• A contact route that a person actually monitors

Disclosure and trust

Donors want to know where money goes and who is accountable. Naming the board, publishing a summary of spending and linking to your filings does more for donations than any appeal.

Registration details should be easy to find rather than buried in a footer. They are the fastest way for a cautious donor to confirm the organization is what it says it is.

Where you make claims about impact, source them the way you would any figure. Our page on citable claims covers the discipline. Nothing here is legal advice.

Donations and data

Collecting donations means collecting personal and payment information, which brings obligations about how that data is stored and used. Our page on personal data covers the general shape.

Be explicit about what happens after a donation. Whether details are kept, whether the donor will be contacted again, and how to stop that. Unclear answers here lose repeat donors.

And keep the donation route simple. Most donation forms lose people at the third field, and asking less is usually worth more than any amount of persuasive copy above it.

Volunteers need their own page

What the roles actually are, how much time they take, what checks are required, and who to speak to. Vagueness here produces enquiries from people who then discover they cannot commit.

Say what happens after somebody volunteers to help. The gap between offering and being contacted is where most volunteer interest disappears.

And keep the page current. A volunteer page listing roles filled two years ago is worse than none, because it wastes the time of exactly the people you wanted.

Say who to contact and how long a reply usually takes. Volunteer enthusiasm has a short half-life, and an offer that sits unanswered for three weeks is almost always an offer that has been withdrawn.