20 Important Things to Include on Your Nonprofit’s Website
How to improve your nonprofit’s SEO, increase website donations, and ensure best practices
Is it time to give your nonprofit website an overhaul? View our checklist of 20 important elements to include on your nonprofit’s website to improve search engine optimization (SEO), enhance your site visitors’ experience, increase donations and support, and ensure best-practices.
1. Skimmable, Concise Copy
Research shows you have about seven seconds to grab a site visitor’s attention. If they don’t find the information they’re looking for and aren’t engaged within those first seven seconds, they will leave your website. Your nonprofit’s homepage should begin with a short “elevator pitch” to let site visitors know what your organization is about and why your work is important.
When designing your nonprofit’s website, you should aim for simplicity over complexity. Use short sentences, short paragraphs, and short overall messages to hold site visitors’ attention. Only include the information that’s absolutely essential on each page.
We recommend using various formatting techniques to break up the text and draw the reader’s eye down your page. Here are some ideas of how to break up your copy and make it more skimmable:
Break the page up into sections with headings and subheadings
Use images, video, and other media to visually convey what your copy is saying and to break up the text
Create bulleted or numbered lists
Make your important text stand out with different heading colors, fonts, and bold or italic styling.
Vary the length of sentences and paragraphs
2. A Call To Action on Every Page
Be sure to include a clear call-to-action (CTA) on every page of your website. Without a clear CTA, your website visitors may not know the next steps to get in touch, donate, volunteer, sign up for your e-newsletter, share your articles on social media, or download helpful information.
CTAs will often be in the form of a button, pop-up, side panel, or fillable form and will include action words like “contact,” “donate,” “volunteer,” “try,” “sign up,” “learn more,” or “start.” You’ll want to be very specific about the action words you choose and the instructions that follow them.
Every page should include a prominently-featured “donate” button. A great place to include one that will display on every page is in the main navigation menu and in the footer of the website. Make it really stand out by turning it into a brightly-colored button.
3. Impactful, High-Quality Photos
Images are one of the most crucial elements when building an engaging website. Pictures are the best way to tell your nonprofit’s story, so choose them carefully. Avoid using blurry, pixelated photos and graphics. The images that will make the biggest impact are those that are original to your organization. Authenticity is key. If your photos look too much like stock photos, it can hurt trust and make your organization seem less official or legitimate. If you have a photographer or videographer on staff or are able to contract one, do it.
A few ideas of photos to include on your nonprofit’s website:
Pictures that show the impact of your nonprofit's work. If you help people, show pictures of the people you help. If you do beach cleanups, take before and after pictures of the work you did or photos of all the trash you collected.
Group photos and individual photos of your staff and board of directors. Allow them to showcase their personalities.
Candid photos of volunteers in action.
Photos from events and fundraisers for your nonprofit.
4. Compressed Images to Minimize Page Load Time
As mentioned above, you’ll want to include high-quality photos, but if the photo files are too large, they can significantly slow down the time it takes for your website to load. Remember how we said that you only have seven seconds to get a site visitor’s attention? Well if that entire time is spent loading your website, they will be more likely to exit your website. In fact, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5) (Portent, 2019). Your website’s rankings in search engines are also impacted by slow page load times. We often use tinyjpg.com to reduce the file size of images before we upload them into a website.
5. Nonprofit Blog
Adding a blog to your nonprofit’s website can showcase your organization, create awareness, share news, and serve as a resource for people who want to learn more about what your nonprofit does and the causes you support.
Blogging is also a great SEO strategy to help your nonprofit website rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, websites with a blog have 434% more search engine-indexed pages than those that don’t (source). Further, marketers that prioritize blogging see 13 times the Return on Investment (ROI) compared to businesses that don’t, according to a HubSpot report.
One of the SEO benefits of blogging is “fresh content.” Search engines want to provide users with timely, up-to-date content. Typically, search engines will present a nonprofit website with recent updates over a nonprofit website that has not been updated in months or longer.
We recommend blogging as often as possible on your website. Hubspot.com found that the more blog posts companies published per month, the more traffic they saw on their website. As a best practice, your blog posts should be at least 300 words in length in order to rank well in the search engines, but a blog that’s over 1,000 words is likely to do even better. Longer posts will rank more easily than short posts. Aiming for one 500-word blog every week or two is a great goal.
6. Mobile-Friendly Functionality
People are highly dependent on their mobile devices. So it should be no surprise that since April of 2015, Google has given search engine ranking priority to websites that display well on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Websites that are not mobile-friendly will rank lower in search results, decreasing your website’s visibility to potential new clients. If you’re unsure if your current nonprofit website meets Google’s mobile standards, you can enter your website’s URL address into Google’s mobile-friendly test to find out.
7. “About Us” Page
Of all the pages on an organization’s website, the About Us page is typically the second most-visited page after the homepage. A great About Us page will help your nonprofit build trust with site visitors. Here are a few elements you should include:
Mission statement and/or vision statement
What your organization does and why it’s unique
Brief company history
Photos and names of team members
Testimonials
CTAs
8. Contact Us Page
People need to know how to get in touch with your nonprofit, so you’ll want to be sure to include a “contact” page on your website with all of your necessary contact information, including your email address, phone number, and mailing address. You can also include a “contact us” form that people can use to email you directly from your website.
9. Dedicated Pages for Each Service or Initiative
If your nonprofit has multiple services it provides, give each service or initiative its own dedicated web page on your website. This will give you the opportunity to expand on the information for each service and will also help with search engine optimization (SEO), so more people can find your website when searching for those services online.
10. Testimonials
Did you know 72% of consumers say positive testimonials and reviews increase their trust in a business (Big Commerce)? Include testimonials on your nonprofit’s website from volunteers and the people you’ve helped (when appropriate). Testimonials are perceived by many potential supporters as the most reliable source of information about the work of a nonprofit organization and its impact.
11. Information for Volunteers
Include a dedicated page on your website about volunteering with your nonprofit to make it easy for people to get involved. List out the ways people can volunteer their time with your organization and include a sign-up form to register or request more information.
12. Email List Signup
Email marketing can be an important element in your nonprofit’s toolkit for driving donations and increasing engagement. Many first-time visitors to your nonprofit’s website may not be ready to make a donation, sign up to volunteer, or register for one of your services, programs, or events. Offering an easy way for people to subscribe to your email list gives your nonprofit a way to stay in touch and compel them toward the action you want them to take, even after they leave your site. After all, if they’re visiting your website, it’s pretty likely that they’re already at least somewhat interested in who you are and what you do.
13. Events Calendar
Events are also an important element for most nonprofits. Events can create awareness about your organization and causes, increase donations, and attract new supporters. Including an events calendar on your website can be a helpful way to promote upcoming events and increase registration or ticket sales.
14. Financials Page
Including your nonprofit’s financial information on your website can help build trust with your potential supporters. In fact, research indicates that individual donors are more likely to contribute when accounting information is available (Parsons, 2007;Trussel and Parsons, 2007). Information that you can include on your financials page are your nonprofit’s annual reports, Form 990, and 501(c)(3) documentation. You should also consider including visuals like graphs, or infographics on the impact donations of different sizes make on your organization.
15. Social Media Links
Your nonprofit’s social media links should be visible throughout your website. The best place to include them are in the header, footer or sidebar. Links to your social media give site visitors another way to connect with you and learn more about your organization. Once they follow your social media accounts, they are more likely to donate or volunteer in the future.
16. SSL Security
You may have noticed that some URLs (web addresses) start with "http://" and others start with "https://". The extra "s" in “https” means that your connection to that website is secure and encrypted and any data you enter on that website is shared safely.
The technology that powers that little "s" is called SSL, which stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” An SSL certificate secures the connection to the website and prevents hackers from impersonating you or stealing your website visitors' information (such as when a visitor is entering details in a form on the website or making a donation with a credit card).
It’s important that your nonprofit’s website is SSL secure, because people want to see the “https” secure URL when visiting any website they are entrusting with their personal information. It’s also important because Google will rank websites lower in search engines that do not have an SSL secure website.
17. Website Privacy Policy
A privacy policy is a statement or a legal document (in privacy law) that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client's data.
In the case of a website, a privacy policy is often a statement that declares a party's policy on how its website collects, stores, and releases personal information it collects. It informs the site visitor what specific information is collected, and whether it is kept confidential, shared with partners, or sold to other organizations or enterprises.
The contents of a privacy policy will depend upon the applicable law and may need to address requirements across geographical boundaries and legal jurisdictions. California Business and Professions Code, Internet Privacy Requirements (CalOPPA) mandate that websites collecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from California residents must conspicuously post their privacy policy.
18. Cookies Consent Pop-up
Have you ever visited a website and seen a little pop-up box that asks for your permission to use “cookies?” The growing use of consent notices for cookies—pieces of data that are sent by websites and stored on the user’s computer by their Web browser—is most often attributed to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as the GDPR.
The European Union (EU) “Cookie Law,” also known as the ePrivacy Directive, states that you can’t track users without consent. Under the Cookie Law, you are obligated to publish a Cookie Policy on your website as well as a consent form and pop-up notification. You must also provide detailed information on the types of Cookies you are using as well as an option for users to decline or delete Cookies.
You are subject to complying with the Cookie Law if you’re a company in the EU, a company doing business in the EU, or a blog or company website receiving traffic from EU clients. However even if you don’t think the Cookie Law applies specifically to your U.S. nonprofit’s website, you should err on the side of caution.
19. Website Accessibility
Website accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed.
By implementing accessibility best practices, you are ensuring that all of your potential users, including people with disabilities, can engage with your website, have a decent user experience, and are able to easily access your information.
In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is being interpreted by the majority of federal courts to apply to websites of private entities (including small businesses, nonprofits, and corporations). If a website isn’t accessible, it can be viewed as discriminatory against persons with disabilities and therefore in violation of the ADA.
The best way to approach website accessibility is to follow the guidelines put forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) under their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). You can learn more about web accessibility here.
If you’re looking for an accessibility widget to add to your website like the one we have on our site, we recommend UserWay*.
* This is an affiliate link to a product we recommend for website accessibility. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking the link.
20. Hire a Website Designer Who Understands Nonprofits
If you’re looking for a website designer to help create a great new website for your nonprofit, please visit Left Lane Digital’s Website Design page to see some of our recent website work. Or if you’re looking to DIY your nonprofit’s website, explore our easy-to-use website templates built specifically for nonprofits.
Let’s recap
Some important things to include in your nonprofit’s website are:
Skimmable, Concise Copy
A Call To Action on Every Page
Impactful, High-Quality Photos
Compressed Images to Minimize Page Load Time
Nonprofit Blog
Mobile-Friendly Functionality
“About Us” Page
Contact Us Page
Dedicated Pages for Each Service or Initiative
Testimonials
Information for Volunteers
Email List Signup
Events Calendar
Financials Page
Social Media Links
SSL Security
Website Privacy Policy
Cookies Consent Pop-up
Website Accessibility
A Disclaimer About This Blog Post
This blog post is not intended to serve as legal advice. By reviewing your state’s ethics guidelines and Rules of Professional Conduct you can obtain specific information on required disclaimers and website laws and take the appropriate steps to ensure that you’re carrying out your professional due diligence in all of your online marketing initiatives.