A donor wants impact. Someone who needs you wants the door.
Donors want impact, stewardship and financial credibility. The people you serve want help, access and dignity. Most non-profit sites try to do both above the fold and manage neither, while a real funding source sits switched off in the background.
One homepage, two audiences who want opposite things from you.
Three things that make this trade its own problem
Donors and the people you serve need opposite pages
Impact, stewardship and a 990 on one side. Hours, eligibility and a phone number on the other. Put both above the fold and the fundraising gets weaker while the service gets harder to reach.
The Ad Grant has rules and they suspend accounts
Click-through thresholds, conversion tracking, keyword restrictions. Free search advertising that nobody is watching quietly stops serving, and usually nobody notices for a quarter.
The donation flow is where it breaks
Recurring gifts, letting a donor designate a gift to one programme, and getting any of it into the donor database. On most sites that is a volunteer, a spreadsheet and a monthly reconciliation nobody enjoys.
Where we would start
- Website DevelopmentA clean split between the give path and the get-help path, with a donation flow that handles recurring and designated gifts properly rather than as an afterthought.→
- Google AdsAd Grant management run inside the compliance rules, which is a different discipline from running a paid account and is the reason so many grant accounts sit suspended.→
- Email MarketingThe donor programme. For most organisations it is the biggest source of online giving and the least attended thing they own.→
- Forms, Portals & AutomationsVolunteer sign-up, service intake and gift acknowledgement, off the spreadsheets and into something that still works when the volunteer who built it moves on.→
Local or national — where this one is actually decided
Genuinely split. Local for service delivery, national for donors. It is one of the few sectors where both strategies have to run at the same time, on the same domain, without blurring.
Work the number out before you spend anything
Plan the ad budget. Free, no sign-up, and the answer is yours whether or not you ever call us.
Open the tool
Not quite your trade?
The rest of education, non-profit & community, or all 59 industries.
Tell us what your customers search for
Describe the enquiries you want more of and the ones you would rather stop getting. You will get a straight read on what would actually move it, from the person who would do the work.
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