5 min read · 416 Strategy
Legitimacy, clarity, recent activity, financial trust, leadership credibility, and evidence of impact — here’s what donors actually evaluate.
Donors rarely tell you they’re evaluating your website. They just quietly visit it after hearing about you, look around, form an impression, and decide whether to give — often without ever contacting you. By the time you know they were there, they’ve already decided. Understanding what they were looking for is the key to building a site that passes the check instead of failing it.
First, legitimacy — does this organization look real, established, and official? Second, clarity — can I understand what they do in one minute, or is it buried in jargon? Third, recent activity — is anything happening now, or does the last blog post date from 2021? Fourth, financial trust — is there evidence of accountability, a board, a 501(c)(3), a GuideStar profile? Fifth, leadership credibility — are there real names and faces, or just a logo? Sixth, evidence of impact — is there a story or a statistic that shows what gifts actually accomplish?
A site passes the check when all six are present and current. A site fails the check when any one is missing or stale — because the donor doesn’t know which signal matters most, so they treat the weakest one as representative. An outdated copyright date, a broken blog, a generic stock photo, a missing board page — any one of these can quietly fail the check, even if everything else is strong. The donor doesn’t weigh the signals. They look for the weakest link.
Spend 20 minutes on your own site as if you were a donor who doesn’t know your work. Ask the six questions honestly. Fix whatever fails. Most of the fixes are small: update the copyright, add a recent post, swap a stock photo for a real one, list your board, add one impact statistic. None of these require a redesign. All of them help your site pass the trust check that every warm referral is quietly running — and passing that check is what turns warm referrals into donors.
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