What donors check on an NGO website before they give

1. Say what you do in the first screen

Many NGO sites open with a mission statement full of big words: empowering, transforming, sustainable. A visitor still cannot tell what you actually do on a Tuesday morning. Say it plainly instead: who you work with, where, and what changes for them.

“We pay school fees and run mentoring for girls in Turkana” tells a donor more than a paragraph of vision. Put it in the first screen, with one real photo from the field.

2. Organise the site around your real work

A common pattern is a menu of themes: education, health, livelihoods, environment, with a thin page behind each one. Funders click, find three lines of text, and conclude the work is smaller than claimed.

Organise around the programmes you actually run. If you have a scholarship fund and a research project, those are your two big pages, each with depth. If an area has nothing real to show yet, leave it off until it does. A smaller site that is all true beats a bigger one that is half empty.

3. Show proof that can be checked

Trust on the internet comes from details that are hard to fake:

• Real names and roles for your team and board, with photos.
• Your registration details and the address or area you work from.
• Recent updates with dates, so visitors can see the work is ongoing.
• Reports and accounts people can download, even short ones.
• Photos from your own work, not stock images of smiling children.

Avoid numbers you cannot back up. A funder who asks “how did you measure that?” and gets silence loses more trust than the number ever gained.

4. Make giving easy, and keep it honest

If supporters want to give, every extra step loses some of them. For Kenyan and diaspora supporters that usually means:

• M-Pesa and card options on one page, with amounts suggested and explained (what KES 2,000 pays for).
• A way to give in more than one currency if you have supporters abroad.
• A thank-you page and email after every gift, so people know it arrived.
• Clear wording on whether a gift is one-off or recurring, and who to contact about a problem.

One point matters more than the rest: payments should go into your organisation's own account. Your payment provider account, such as Paystack, should be in your name, with your own dashboard, so money never passes through a developer or a third party. Ask any web developer who proposes to handle donations how this works.

5. Work on phones, on slow connections

Many of your supporters and partners will open your site on a phone, often on mobile data. Huge photos and heavy page builders make the site slow, and a slow site gets abandoned before it has said a word. Photos should be sized properly, pages should load quickly, and the main actions, give, call, message, should be one tap away.

6. Own your site

This is the one NGOs most often get wrong. Before you pay for a website, make sure that:

• The domain name is registered in the organisation's name, not a volunteer's or a developer's.
• You hold the hosting login, or at least know who does and can get it.
• You can get a full copy of the site and its content if you part ways.
• Someone is responsible for updates and security after launch.

Plenty of charities have lost their website, or paid again to get it back, because the person who built it moved on and held all the logins.

7. Plan for the updates, not just the launch

A site that has not been updated for a year suggests an organisation that has gone quiet. Decide up front who posts updates, how often, and how hard it is. If adding a story needs a developer, it will not get added. Aim for a setup where your own team can post a field update in a few minutes.

A practical checklist

1. Can a stranger say what you do after ten seconds on the homepage?
2. Does every page have real content behind it?
3. Are your people, registration and contact details visible?
4. Is there a dated update from the last two months?
5. Can someone give in two taps on a phone, and get a thank-you?
6. Is the domain in your organisation's name, and do you know where the logins are?
7. Does the homepage load quickly on a phone? Our free health report will tell you.

What this looks like in practice

We recently rebuilt the website for PAIR Kenya, a pastoralist-led charity. Its old site grouped the work under generic themes. The new one is organised around what PAIR actually runs, takes gifts in KES and USD through PAIR's own Paystack account, and works without WordPress, on PAIR's own hosting. You can see more on our page for NGOs and charities.