In this day and age, people are likely to research your nonprofit by checking out your website before they get involved, donate, or support your cause. Your website should represent the brand and image that represents and clearly explains your organization, give people a reason to get involved, and make donating as easy as possible. Your nonprofit website should be a hub of engaging information that clearly communicates your cause, educates people on what you do, and explains the significance that your support will provide.

Here are our tips for the must haves to a successful non profit website, in no particular order.

About Page

This is the place that you get to talk about your organization and show people who you are and what you stand for. Not only are ‘about pages’ typically the most visited pages of a website, this is your chance to elevator pitch your cause to your website visitors. Showcase the cause, the mission, and the goals of your organization as well as the personal stories and accounts of those working, volunteering, and benefitting from the organization.

Donate Now Button

Nonprofits typically rely on donations, so make sure that it’s easy for visitors to donate and encourage them to do so by having strong calls to action urging them to “donate now” displayed on every page of your website, and tastefully appropriate. If your organization relies on other things such as volunteer help, product or in-kind donation support, or attendance at the next event, the key is to keeping the call to action strong for each of these requests, throughout your site.

Great Content

Having great content on your website is the key to engaging visitors and providing them with information relevant to their needs. This also helps people find you when they search online for information about the topics and issues your organization supports.

Writing to your audience, telling the stories, and speaking about your cause should come natural to you. Your stories are what will excite, engage, and convince others to support you cause.

Having a game plan of who will write and how often for your website will keep your website active (good for SEO) but also be good for goal setting. Tools to handle your website and your blogging should be incorporated into the initial web designing process and staff who will be writing should be trained on how to make it work best.

Visual Storytelling

Stock photos do not express the true feelings and emotions of a nonprofit cause. Use real photos that capture moments and help tell the story of what your mission is all about.

Hire a professional photographer to help you with these. Then you will have them for other uses and the more the pictures speak to your cause, the more people will understand (without having to read anything), and the more support you will get.

Your smartphone may be great for capturing photos to use for social media, but high quality professional photos are very important for use in your nonprofit website design.

For an example, visit the website of Patch Adams, MD’s nonprofit organization, The Gesundheit! Institute and you can see how the photos from their clowning trips speak to the viewer.

Keeping It Current with a Blog

The content on your website is the meat and potatoes to let people know your goals, mission and history. The blog is the dessert, fresh and creative, and as often as you have time to enjoy creating it. Encourage other members of your organization to also blog to take pressure off yourself and to increase the regularity of posting. Keeping an active blog is a great way to create a following and increase engagement. Your nonprofit is an expert on its cause and this is your opportunity to put out articles that showcase that expertise, that passion, and the feel-good moments that involve your mission, and spread your message. From a marketing standpoint, blog posts create additional content on your website, create a network of backlinks from other sites, and ultimately drive new traffic to your website for broader searches. The more active you are with updating and expanding the content on your website and blog, the more active the search crawlers look for your site which is great for search engine rankings and keyword search. Business and Professional People for Public Interest (BPI) is a nonprofit organization that utilizes their blog to write posts about announcements, annual report, events, new fellows and interns.

Social Media Integration



Social media is powerful and there is a wide array of platforms to post about your organization. However, strategically keeping your website as the hub of all content gives your readers and viewership the chance to choose their platform. An interested visitor can stop by your website once and then follow/circle/sign-up for your organization’s presence on his/her favorite network and continually get updates moving forward. By using social media as a distribution tool, your organization’s message is broadcast farther, yet home is still the website. The more social media attention received, the more website traffic your organization will get, enhancing your SEO, and ultimately resulting in more exposure and support for your organization.

Consider the alternative. Posting a viral Facebook post with no link to your website or no call to action can disappear quickly. It may not be searchable from Google or Bing and without a link through to your website, there is a good chance it will get lost. Since most social media platforms do not interface, there is little to no engagement among the other social circles. If that same post were put on a blog, it could then be emailed to a distribution list and posted to several social media sites, all working together to get the user back to your website, where there is a large call to action ready to happen.

Now What?

You need a website or to redesign your existing one. Remember, your website mimics your organizational structure, its mission, goals, and messaging. Do your research on what you are looking for in a website. Pull some competitor sites or websites that really speak to you, and write a list of what you like and don’t like. Have a clear picture of what you are looking for before you start contacting web design firms.

Speaking of web design companies, remember choosing one is like picking a car. Although you can’t take a website for a test ride, you will need to consider your style, the power of the engine, its safety, as well as how long its going to last before you will want or need a new one.