AI website builder for nonprofits

Nonprofit websites carry an unusual load. They have to convince donors, recruit volunteers, be usable by the people the organisation actually serves, and satisfy funders and regulators who want to see governance documents. Usually they are maintained by someone whose main job is something else entirely.

Siteglade builds the site from a description and keeps it editable in plain language, which matters when the person updating it changes every time a trustee rotates off the board.

This page covers how to serve three very different audiences without confusing all of them, how to tell your story without exploiting the people in it, what to do about donations, and why accessibility is not optional here.

Donors, volunteers and beneficiaries want different things

The classic nonprofit homepage tries to speak to everyone at once and ends up speaking to nobody. A donor wants to know what their money does and whether the organisation is competent. A volunteer wants to know what they would actually be asked to do and when. Someone who needs the service wants to know if they qualify and how to get help, right now, without navigating a fundraising narrative first.

The third group is the one most often failed, and the failure is serious. If your organisation provides support, the route to that support should be reachable from the top of the homepage in one obvious click, written in plain language, and not buried under a donation appeal. Someone in difficulty should not have to read about your gala to find the helpline.

Design the homepage as three doors rather than one funnel, and let each path carry its own tone. The get help path should be calm and practical. The donate path can be emotive. The volunteer path should be specific about time commitment, because vagueness there wastes everybody.

• Get help: plainly labelled, high on the page, plain language, no fundraising in the way.
• Donate: what the money does, at concrete amounts, with your legal status stated.
• Volunteer: actual tasks, actual hours, actual next step.
• Funders and press: annual reports, governance and contacts, in one findable place.

Telling the story without exploiting the people in it

Fundraising communication has a long history of using imagery and language that strips dignity from the people it depicts, and the sector has spent years moving away from it. Your website is where that choice is most visible.

The practical version: get informed consent for every photograph and every story, and make it real consent, meaning the person understood where it would appear and could say no without losing access to your service. Let people be named as they wish to be named. Show agency rather than only need. Avoid the framing where a beneficiary exists purely as evidence of a donor generosity.

If you cannot obtain consent, or the person is a child, or the context is sensitive, use illustration, photographs of staff and places, or images where nobody is identifiable. That constraint tends to produce better communication anyway, because it forces you to explain the work rather than lean on a face.

On generated imagery: Media Studio can produce images on every plan, but do not generate depictions of the people you serve and present them as real. It is a fabricated representation of a vulnerable group, and no framing makes that acceptable. Generated media in Siteglade projects carries machine-readable AI provenance markup, which helps, but labelling does not make a misleading depiction honest. Abstract textures, background plates and diagrams are a different matter and are entirely fine.

Donations: Siteglade does not process them

This is the constraint to plan around. Siteglade has no payment processing, no donation handling and no checkout, and handling charitable donations correctly involves gift aid or equivalent tax handling, recurring payment management, receipting and reconciliation. That belongs in a dedicated donation platform.

So the site links out to the platform you already use, and your job is to make the donation path convincing and impossible to miss. That is where the real gains are anyway, because most nonprofit sites lose donors on the page before the payment form, not on the form itself.

What lifts donation conversion is specificity. Say what a given amount does in concrete terms that you can actually substantiate. Explain what proportion goes to programme work if you are comfortable publishing it. State your registered charity number and legal status. Make the recurring option visible rather than hiding it behind a toggle nobody notices, because regular giving is worth far more over time.

Do not publish a claim about administrative costs or impact numbers that you cannot support from your own accounts. Funders check, journalists check, and the reputational cost of an unsupportable figure is out of all proportion to the extra donation it might win.

• Link out to your existing donation platform; do not improvise payments.
• Describe what specific amounts fund, in terms you can evidence.
• Show your registered number and legal status on the page.
• Make recurring giving a visible choice, not a hidden checkbox.

Accessibility is not optional for a public-benefit site

A nonprofit site is more likely than most to be read by someone using a screen reader, someone with low vision, someone on an old phone over a poor connection, or someone in distress with very little patience for a clever interface. In many jurisdictions there are also legal obligations, particularly for organisations receiving public funding.

Ask for accessibility explicitly in the prompt, because it is much cheaper to build in than to retrofit. Strong colour contrast, text that resizes without breaking the layout, real headings in a sensible order, keyboard navigation that works, form fields with proper labels, alt text that describes the image rather than repeating the caption, and no critical information conveyed by colour alone.

Then check it rather than assuming. Tab through the whole site with the keyboard, turn on a screen reader for five minutes, and view it at two hundred percent zoom. Those three checks catch most of what matters. Plain language is part of accessibility too: if your service description requires a reading age of eighteen, some of the people who need it will not get through it.

How to brief the builder on your mission

The prompt should carry your actual mission, your actual audiences and your actual constraints. Nonprofit prompts go wrong when they describe a category rather than the work, because the result reads like every other charity site.

For example: 'Build a site for a registered charity in Manchester providing free legal advice on housing and eviction to private renters, staffed by volunteer solicitors. Calm, clear and non-institutional: light background, one deep teal, one warm accent, a highly legible sans at generous size, strong contrast, no stock photography of sad people. The homepage must open with three clearly labelled paths: Get advice, Volunteer, Donate, with Get advice first and most prominent. Get advice explains in plain language who we can help, what we cannot do, how to contact us, our opening hours and our typical response time. Volunteer describes the two roles, the training provided and the time commitment in hours per month, and ends with an application form. Donate explains what fifteen, forty and one hundred pounds fund, and links to our external donation page. Add pages for about and governance with trustees, annual reports and our charity number, and a contact page. Accessibility is a requirement: WCAG AA contrast, keyboard navigation, labelled form fields, and text that reflows at two hundred percent zoom. Do not invent statistics, case studies or testimonials, and leave placeholders where I will add real ones.'

That final instruction is essential in this sector. A model asked to write compelling charity copy will produce convincing impact figures and beneficiary stories that are entirely fictional. Leave placeholders and fill them from your own records.

Reports, transparency and the documents people look for

Funders, journalists, regulators and thoughtful donors all go looking for the same small set of documents, and a site that hides them creates suspicion where there was none. Give them one page and link to it from the footer of every page.

That page should hold your annual report and accounts for the last few years, your registered number and legal form, your trustees or board with a line about each, your safeguarding and complaints policies if you work with people, and a named contact for press and for concerns. If you publish an impact report, put it here rather than scattering statistics across the marketing pages.

Keep it current, because a governance page whose most recent report is three years old says something worse than having no page. Because updating means a message in the chat or a direct file edit in the built-in editor, this is a task a trustee can do in ten minutes rather than a web request that waits six months. Analytics on Pro and Max, which aggregate sessions, sources and devices for the published site, are often exactly the evidence a grant report asks for.

Last updated: 2026-08-16