Websites for nonprofits and community organizations
The site has to do several jobs on a budget that assumes it will only do one — explain the work, bring in money, sign up volunteers, and often run a programme as well. Deciding which job comes first is most of the work.
Talk about your projectWhat a nonprofit site has to get right
Good intentions are not the constraint here. Clarity and staff time are.
Say what you do in one sentence
Mission statements written by committee tend to describe values rather than activity. A visitor who cannot tell what you actually do within a few seconds does not give, apply or volunteer.
Giving with as few steps as possible
Every field and every extra screen between the decision and the confirmation loses a share of donors. Recurring giving should take no more effort than a one-off.
The programme itself, if it lives online
Some organizations are really running software — member accounts, applications, exchanges, hours logged. That is a build, not a brochure, and pretending otherwise produces a site nobody can use.
Updatable by whoever is there
Staff and volunteers change. A site only a developer can edit goes stale within a year, and stale is what donors read as inactive.
What we build for nonprofits
Programme pages
Each programme explained plainly, with eligibility and the actual next step rather than a general enquiry form.
Donations
One-off and recurring, low-friction, connected to whatever you already use for records so giving does not create reconciliation work.
Applications and intake
Grant, service or membership applications online, routed and tracked instead of arriving as email attachments.
Member and volunteer areas
Logins, dashboards and whatever the programme actually needs when the work happens on the site itself.
Impact, honestly presented
Numbers and outcomes shown without inflation — funders read the difference, and so do donors.
Handover you can use
Built so your team can run it, with the training to make that true rather than a document nobody opens.
Questions
How much of the donation reaches us?
That depends on the processor you choose, not on us. We will lay out the realistic options and their fees before anything is built, because over a year the difference is not trivial.
Can we take recurring donations?
Yes, and it is usually the single highest-value thing a nonprofit site can add. Recurring giving is worth building the flow around rather than offering as a checkbox.
We need members to log in and do things. Is that a website?
It is closer to software, and it should be scoped as software. We build that — but it is honest to say up front that it is a different size of project than a brochure site.
Do you offer nonprofit pricing?
Talk to us about the budget you have. Scope is more negotiable than quality, and it is usually better to build the important half properly than all of it thinly.
How long does a build take?
Two to four weeks for an informational site with giving. Longer where a programme runs on the site.
Tell us what you need it to do
Describe the business and what the site is failing to do now. We will tell you what it would take.
See the other industries we build for, or where we work.