Web Design and SEO for CharitiesWeb Design and SEO for Charities

What usually goes wrong in charities and nonprofits

A charity site serves two audiences who want opposite things. A donor wants to know where the money goes and to give in under a minute. A beneficiary wants to know whether they qualify and how to get help, often urgently and often on an old phone. Most charity sites are written for neither, because they are written for the trustees — history, structure, strategy, annual report — and the two people who matter both have to dig.

The donation route is usually the weakest thing on the site. It is commonly a link out to a third-party platform on a different domain, which breaks the visual thread at the exact moment trust matters most, and it frequently does not prompt for Gift Aid. For an eligible UK taxpayer Gift Aid adds 25% at no cost to the donor, so a donation page that does not ask for it is leaving a quarter of the money on the table on every gift.

And then the basics that establish legitimacy go missing. The registered charity number, who the trustees are, what proportion of income reaches the cause, and what actually changed last year. A charity is asking for money from strangers on the internet, which is the same thing a scam does — the difference has to be visible on the page, not in a PDF annual report nobody opens.

What transfers, and what does not

The transferable work is CFC Wedding Lists: a free gift-list service run by a family furniture retailer trading since 1972, where the journey is a persuasion problem rather than a checkout. Nobody has to use it, nothing is being bought, and the site has to be clear enough and trustworthy enough that somebody commits anyway. That is the same shape as a donation.

What this page cannot show is a charity case study. There is not one, and the honest version of that is a sentence rather than a stock photograph of volunteers.

What you get, and what it costs

The same three numbers as every other page on this site: from £500 for the build, from £50 a month for hosting and care, and growth blocks from £250 a month when you want the site to earn more. No setup fee, no management fee, no percentage of ad spend, no minimum term.

• A bespoke build rather than a page-builder assembly, so it is fast on a phone rather than fast on your laptop.
• A page for each thing you actually sell and each place you sell it, so every search a customer might run has somewhere of its own to land.
• Editable by you, with a walkthrough at handover.
• The domain in your name and the hosting in your account, with a full working copy if you ever leave.
• Tracking that counts phone taps as well as forms, because in most sectors the phone is the majority of enquiries.