8 Tips to Design a Charity Website

I am currently designing a website for a christian charity-organization and your tips are very helpful. Thank you.

One idea that I want to add is that there are thousands of NGOs and socially conscious organizations globally (110,000 web-savvy orgs listed on wiserearth.com alone) and each organization approaches their missions / challenges in incredibly unique ways, so its important to spend a lot of time in the initial research phase collaborating with the client to find unique solutions to the problems they are trying to solve. I know that a lot of you are already conscious of this but its easy to rush through because the non profit will often want to jump straight into visual design because they are so enthusiastic and excited about just getting a presence in the digital world.

Also, for readers like Timothy who have never really thought about participating in non profit creative work should “google” The Taproot Foundation. They are an organization that assembles teams of professionals who volunteer about 5 hours a week (from beginning to end of project) to create professional level work for clients that normally wouldn’t be able to afford these services. I’ve done a few projects with them during the past 7 years.

Its also a fantastic way for professionals and students to network, collaborate and actually try out different team roles that you may not normally have access to in your day job.

Cheers,

Shawn
Visual & Interaction Designer
Global Oneness Projectg

That’s a good summary of key elements to a charity website, and I like your focus on fundraising content and reporting back to donors about how their money makes a difference.

I’m sure it would have been easy for you to extend the list beyond 8 tips, but if I had to add just one, I’d suggest either a link(s) to the charity’s presence(s) on some of the social media sites e.g. Flickr, or adding a function that lets supporters get involved in the site e.g. by commenting on a blog, uploading photos etc.

In other words, charities need reminding that all the action will never happen entirely on their website: they need to engage with supporters where they like to be online.

Yeah nice im currently in the middle of designing a web site for Wildlife Rescuers.
This is there current site http://www.wildliferescuers.org.au/ needless to say it needs improvment!
I will post when i have finnished there new 1.

Some good advice here – although there’s more to nonprofit websites than just donations. Charities also need to provide information about their activities; many use the web for campaigning; and some run online advice services.

I liked the gallery of screenshots from charities, it’s always good to see that they can achieve results as good as or better than the business world. On the other hand, here’s one of the very worst nonprofit websites: http://www.globalaigs.org/.

Here’s another tip for nonprofit websites: apply immediately for a Google Grant – http://www.google.com/grants – to get a massive amount of free online adverts. It can work wonders in boosting website traffic and is only available to charities.

I am currently working on a charity organization website design and your post is very much relevant to my project. I get lot of information from your post. i am happy to visit your site and see lots of good thing that helpful for me.

keep it up and i am expecting i will see more useful information in your website.

I just saw that Smashing Magazine has published an article about best practice for nonprofit websites with lots of good advice and screenshots of some great examples from charity websites.

It’s at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/14/non-profit-website-design-examples-and-best-practices/.

Thank you for sharing!

This is fantastic i have just started my first charity website for one of our customers and will certainly keep coming back to read this while i am buiding the site.

Thank you really helpful

Thanks for taking the time to put together a great article. I was wondering if you came across some good sites focusing on web development for charities? Thanks!

Thanks for sharing this good info article and list.

Excellent article, well done. I’m looking at offering Charities in North Wales a free web design service as a way of generating links to my own site and this will certainly help. Thanks.

that is very interesting topic i really love it and all the tips i found them useful, am currently creating a charity site and all the ideas were helpful.

This is an awesome post! A lot of really useful tips!

We actually used some of your pointers to develop and design a website for one of our clients; BTI Foundation. This is an organisation that was found to support the Maasai communities of Kenya and Tanzania in realizing good education.

http://www.btifoundation.com

I designed http://growingliberiaschildren.org which was launched last year. Though I did extensive research, this article would have come in handy—particularly tips 5 and 6. Good stuff.

WebDesignerDepot was suggested to our development team as a starting point for our re-design of a very popular Irish Charity website. Finding it enlightening and great links to other well-designed charity sites for inspration :) Watch this space for mid-2010 – thanks…

Excellent Article on non-profit web site design.
Not only website owners but it also does help the web design companies.

This is a great post for people about to embark on or commission a charity website design project. I have been involved with http://www.camfed.org for a few years now and we recently relaunched their website. Good to know that it ticks all the boxes. (:

One of the most important points in this post is number 6 – “have a fundraising goal”. After we implemented short target appeals for donors to contribute to, we experienced a 500% (no mistype) rise in online revenues in the first two months that this feature went live.

Donors no longer want to donate into a charity pot to be spent on anything the organisation wants – donors want to understand the value of their donation to the recipient. Look at the Kiva model – short term goals, transparent fundraising progress, feedback from the recipient, viral marketing tools – this is a fantastic model to follow.

A big transparency issue is thinking carefully about the way that a charity org uses images/footage of its recipients. Avoid using stock images, use images of the real people you are helping. But more crucially, tell those people how you will use their images. Camfed’s child protection policy builds in this approval from the moment a photographer takes an image.

Maps are also important – potential donors want to understand the geographical context of the organisation’s mission. The more functionality you can build into maps, the better – use them for lead generation, donor acquisition and information.

All of these designs are really mind blowing. Thank you for sharing. This must be bookmark

Great post. Do you know how many of these websites are drupal and who designed them? We are a UK based charity with a drupal website, but we need a good company to help us take it to the next level

Good question re Drupal Paul. If you find out, do share here. That said, you can usually spot a Drupal site by looking in the HTML and noting all the links to CSS sheets and modules in the section at the top. That’s the way I usually use to check to see if a site is made with Drupal.

If you get any good recommendations for UK Drupal companies/people, esp those with experience of the charity sector, do share. Thanks.