Creating a Nonprofit WordPress Website

Step 1: Determine Website Goals and Target Audience

The most important step is to determine what you want your nonprofit website to accomplish. Determine the top two to three goals that the WordPress nonprofit website should achieve, ideally with tangible outcomes to measure the success of your results. For example, educating prospective donors is a very broad goal. A more tangible goal is to educate prospective donors by consistently increasing newsletter subscribers by 5% per month. Another goal could be to show the impact of the organization’s mission by creating campaigns that raise $10,000 in online donations. These will help establish the website design and layout to determine the call-to-actions needed to achieve your desired goals.

While deciding your goals, it may also be important to establish your target audience. For example, if the website is for a school, the target audience is prospective and current students, parents or caregivers, and community donors. Perhaps your goal is to recruit new students. The audience would differ if you were an organization targeting young professionals who want to mentor students in inner-city schools. While many nonprofit websites target a general audience, if your audience is more specific, the website design should speak to and appeal to them.

Step 2: Develop Nonprofit Branding and Design 

After establishing your website’s key goals, decide your website’s brand and theme. A nonprofit website’s brand includes the color scheme, logo, and fonts used consistently throughout the site to create a consistent “look” for visitors. Certain fonts and color schemes are easily associated with such themes. WordPress offers plenty of themes that fit your brand and support your nonprofit organization. The theme should be cohesive with your brand, such as classy, modern, or youthful.

Read more on nonprofit website branding practices.

Nonprofit Design Best Practices

Here are some helpful best practices to help maximize your non-profit website’s goals.

Present Clear Calls-to-Action

A call-to-action is a website button or function that drives visitors to take a desired action. Having prominent call-to-action buttons are one of the first basic principles of non-profit website best practices. If the desired call to action is for supporters to make online donations, make sure a DONATE NOW button appears in the website header. Our non-profit website templates prominently display a Donate Now button in the main navigation area because every charity organization wants to raise money. Another popular call to action is subscribing to the nonprofit newsletter, which should also be noticeable in the website footer. Be sure to guide your website visitors where you want them to go.

Saying Less Often Means More

Have you ever seen a website page with no visuals and a lot of text? Changes are, you didn’t stay around to read it all. Saying less with words and more with images and photos can communicate your mission more effectively to website visitors. Use beautiful, impactful images on your website.

Funnel Results into a Nonprofit Donor Management/CRM System

Your nonprofit website is the face of your organization, but the data you get from the website is the key. Streamlining is the magic word here, and aggregating all of the call-to-action data results into a strong nonprofit CRM and donor management system is vital to your non-profit’s success. Not to mention making life easier for you and your nonprofit’s development team down the road when managing fundraising campaigns.

Use Social Media Often

Social media is a great way to further engage your supporters and establish an initial point of contact with new prospects on your website. These visitors can eventually become donors, event participants, or volunteers if you keep them in the loop on your nonprofit’s campaigns and mission. Displaying social media icons prominently on your website and keeping social media content fresh (short, daily posts are best) is a nonprofit fundraising strategy that leads to success. 

Step 3: Plan the Nonprofit Website Sitemap

Creating a website is like taking a trip by car. To get there quickly and effectively, it helps to have a map on hand. Designing and navigating websites work similarly, with a sitemap as a guide. You can often find sitemaps in the footer of many websites, and they show the tree structure of how the website pages are laid out. Planning the sitemap makes it easier to plan the content needed for each page. Here are some web pages to consider including when using WordPress for nonprofits:

Some of these will be sub-pages under certain web pages, such as About Us, which can further break out to Our Organization, Gallery, and Meet the Staff. Get Involved can further break out to Volunteer, Events/Calendars, Fundraiser Support Page, and Volunteer. While this can be overwhelming to plan, DoJiggy has plenty of great WordPress nonprofit themes and layouts that already do the hard work for you. Even if your website is for a school, there are plenty of layouts that DoJiggy offers that are created to achieve the website goals specific for schools.

Step 4: Create Stellar Website Content

To help your WordPress nonprofit website get found, it needs great content that people are searching for. Content includes the website copy, graphics, and images. You must also present the website content in a way search engines can understand. This is called SEO – search engine optimization. Click here for a helpful guideline on SEO tactics for non-profit websites.

Here are some helpful tips when creating non-profit website content.

Website Copy

Website copy should be inviting, concise, and effective in conveying your message. When a website is too wordy, especially on the home page, this can deter new website visitors from clicking further. However, certain pages can go in further depth with more copy, such as blogs and newsletters. When writing more text-heavy pages, implement SEO practices to optimize placement within search engines.

Graphics

Graphics include not only your logo but also graphs and infographics. With pie charts, bar graphs, and other graphics, you can clearly communicate your organization’s impact in as few words as possible. Infographics should also use the same branding (color scheme and font) and be shared widely.

Images

Images and photos can be especially effective for storytelling. Thoughtfully photographed, high-resolution images can captivate your website visitors on your home page. Helpful images include photos of the audience your nonprofit serves and volunteers during efforts or special events (such as your walk-a-thon fundraiser).

Here are some more helpful content and design tips to consider when creating content for your nonprofit organization.