What a nonprofit website needs

A nonprofit website has to earn trust quickly and then make it easy to act: give, volunteer, attend, or get help. Say what you do in one sentence on the home page, put a Donate button in the header of every page, give each program its own page, show your impact with real numbers, and make the volunteer sign-up short. A site built this way also meets most of what Google Ad Grants asks of a nonprofit's website.

The basics every small business site shares, such as owning your domain, security, speed, and upkeep, are in WordPress for small businesses.

The pages you need

If people come to you for services, the Get help page may matter more than any other. Write it for someone stressed and on a phone.

Donations

Every step between "I want to give" and "Thank you" loses donors. Make the path short:

• Donate button in the header of every page, linking to one donation page.
• Keep donors on your site if you can: a form on your own donation page, or a donation platform's form embedded there. Sending people to a differently branded site makes some hesitate.
• Ask only for what you need: amount, name, email, payment, and an optional dedication. Ask for a mailing address only if you send printed receipts or appeals.
• Offer monthly giving right next to one-time gifts, and make it easy to choose.
• Suggest amounts with what each one does, if you can say so honestly ("$40 provides a week of after-school meals for one child").
• Send an automatic receipt with your organization's legal name and the details donors need for their taxes, then a real thank-you.
• List other ways to give: checks (with the mailing address), employer matching, gifts of stock, donor-advised funds, and planned giving, with a contact person.

Common ways to take donations on WordPress: a form plugin with a payment add-on (Gravity Forms has Stripe and PayPal add-ons), a donation plugin such as GiveWP, or a hosted donation platform's embedded form. Compare the processing and platform fees per gift, whether donors can manage their own monthly gifts, and whether you can export donor data to your CRM.

Volunteers

• List each role with what it involves, the time commitment, where it happens, age limits, and whether it needs a background check or training.
• Keep the sign-up form short: name, contact details, the roles and times they're interested in, and anything you must know before the first shift. Collect the rest later.
• Say what happens next and how soon you'll reply, then reply. Volunteers who hear nothing don't sign up twice.
• If you schedule many volunteers across many shifts, a volunteer management tool usually works better than a website form. Link to it from the volunteer page.

Impact reporting

Donors, funders, and board members want to know what changed because of your work.

• Lead with outcomes, not activity. "84% of students in our tutoring program moved up a reading level" says more than "We held 600 tutoring sessions."
• Give numbers context: the time period, how you measured it, and how it compares with last year.
• Pair numbers with stories, with the person's consent and photos they've agreed to.
• Publish the annual report as a web page, with the full PDF linked for download. People read a page on a phone; few open a PDF.
• Show your financials: link to your most recent Form 990 and audit if you have one, or to your profile on Candid (formerly GuideStar).

Only publish numbers you can back up. A funder who checks one figure and finds it inflated stops trusting the rest.

Google Ad Grants

Google Ad Grants gives eligible nonprofits free search ads on Google. As of October 2026, Google describes it as up to $10,000 USD per month in search ads shown on Google.com. Unused funds don't carry over. The grant is real money, but keeping it means following rules every month.

Who's eligible

In the US, your organization needs current 501(c)(3) status and a Google for Nonprofits account. Other countries have their own equivalent requirements. Not eligible: government entities, hospitals and healthcare organizations, and schools, colleges, and universities. The charitable foundations of healthcare organizations and the philanthropic arms of educational institutions can apply. A fiscally sponsored project without its own 501(c)(3) status isn't eligible.

What your website needs

Google reviews your website before approving the grant. Its website policy asks for:

• A domain you own that hosts your site directly, not a redirect to a donation platform or social media page
• Substantial, original content about your mission and programs, with no "under construction" pages, and core information on web pages rather than in PDFs
• Your mission stated clearly, plus your physical address, EIN or registration number, and/or an annual report
• The whole site served over HTTPS, with no mixed content warnings
• Pages that work on phones and load quickly (Google points to PageSpeed Insights)
• Working navigation and donation links, and no broken links
• Any sales clearly tied to your mission, no AdSense ads, and no site built mainly around affiliate links

Keeping the grant

Google sets account rules that grantees must meet, including:

• A click-through rate of at least 5% across the account each month. Missing it two months in a row can lead to the account being temporarily deactivated.
• Conversion tracking set up, recording meaningful actions such as donations, sign-ups, and form submissions
• No keywords with a Quality Score of 1 or 2
• No single-word keywords (with a few exceptions, such as your own brand name) and no overly generic keywords
• At least two ad groups per campaign and at least two sitelinks
• Location targeting that shows ads where your services are useful
• A response to Google's annual program survey

Plan for someone to check the account every month. Your website does a lot of the work: ads have to land on pages that answer the search and give people something to do, such as a program page with a sign-up form or a donation page.

How to apply

1. Make sure your site meets the website policy above and loads entirely over HTTPS.
2. Request a Google for Nonprofits account and wait for your organization to be verified.
3. In Google for Nonprofits, activate Ad Grants and enter your website. Google sets up the Ads account for you: don't create your own Google Ads account during activation.
4. Set up conversion tracking on your site before your ads start, so you can meet the rules from the first month. See Track form submissions in Google Analytics 4.

Google changes these rules from time to time. Check the current versions before you apply.

Sources: Google Ad Grants, Google for Nonprofits eligibility (US), Ad Grants website policy, Ad Grants account compliance, Google Ad Grants help.

Privacy and trust

• Take payments through a processor so card details never touch your website.
• Say in your privacy policy what you collect from donors and volunteers, and whether you ever share or trade donor lists.
• Show your nonprofit status, address, and how to reach a person on the About and Donate pages.

Common mistakes

• The Donate button is hard to find, or only on the home page.
• The donation form asks for a dozen fields before the amount.
• The site sends donors to a platform page with no branding and no way back.
• The mission statement is a paragraph of jargon.
• Impact is a list of activities, not results.
• The annual report and financials are only PDFs, or missing.
• The volunteer form goes to an inbox nobody checks.
• Ad Grants traffic lands on the home page instead of a page that matches the search.

If your site runs on Dirigible

• Donate button: the header button puts Donate on every page. See Add a header menu button.
• Forms: Gravity Forms matches your site's styles, and hidden fields can save which campaign or ad a donor or volunteer came from. See Save UTM parameters with Gravity Forms entries.
• Impact: the Chart block turns a small table of numbers into a bar, line, or pie chart in your site's colors, and the Counters block shows key figures that count up as visitors scroll. See Chart and Counters.
• Programs and resources: Dirigible Cards builds a filterable directory of programs, services, or partner organizations. See Build a resource or partner directory with cards.
• Staff and board: Dirigible People builds a staff and board directory. See Build a staff directory or team page.
• Events and fundraisers: Dirigible Events lists events and can sell tickets (or give free ones) through WooCommerce with QR code check-in. See Sell event tickets with QR code check-in.
• Ad Grants website checks: Dirigible Optimize tests your home page's PageSpeed score daily, and Audit broken links in Dirigible → Tools & Maintenance finds links that lead nowhere. See Daily PageSpeed score and Content gardening tools.
• Tracking: Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager IDs go in the theme's tracking fields. See Add tracking codes to your site.