Nonprofit Website Design: Lessons From 84 Nonprofit Drupal Projects

A nonprofit website has three jobs, and good nonprofit website design is mostly the discipline of not letting any of them crowd out the others. It has to explain the mission to someone who has never heard of you, turn a share of those visitors into donors, volunteers or members, and show funders and partners that the organisation is run carefully. Pretty pages help with all three. Clear paths matter more.

To see what organisations actually prioritise when they rebuild, we read all 84 case studies tagged Non-profit on drupal.org over the last two years. Accessibility and migration dominate. Donations, the thing most nonprofit design advice is about, come up in barely a quarter.

What 84 nonprofit Drupal projects prioritised

We coded every drupal.org case study tagged Non-profit and published between October 2024 and October 2026: charities, foundations, advocacy groups, legal aid services, cultural institutions and membership organisations, from UNICEF and Save the Children to local hospices and animal shelters. For each one we recorded the topics its write-up mentions.

Accessibility leads, at 65%. That is higher than in the healthcare case studies we coded for our HIPAA-compliant website guide (52%), and it makes sense: nonprofits serve the public, often including people with disabilities, and many receive public funding that comes with accessibility conditions.

Migration is the second story, at 54%. Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025, and a large share of these projects are organisations moving off it, usually onto Drupal 10 or 11, sometimes from WordPress or an older proprietary CMS. If you are in that position, the Drupal 7 to 11 migration checklist and our data on how long 29 real migrations took are the places to start.

Donations appear in only 27%. That does not mean nonprofits stopped fundraising; it reflects how they do it. Giving usually runs through a specialist donation platform or a payment processor embedded in the site, and the case studies rarely name it: Salesforce appears in four, PayPal in three, Stripe and CiviCRM in two each. The website’s job is to get the visitor to that form quickly and keep the experience on-brand when they arrive.

One newer signal: 11 of the 84 (13%) mention AI features, from AI-enabled legal aid platforms in Illinois to an AI-assisted Drupal 7 to 11 relaunch. Two years ago that line would have been empty.

The homepage: eight elements that turn visitors into supporters

The most common nonprofit homepage mistake is trying to say everything: a rotating carousel of five campaigns, three calls to action of equal weight, and a mission statement written for a grant application. A first-time visitor gives you a few seconds. Use them for one sentence about what you do, one button that says what you want them to do, and proof that the work is real.

Two details are worth stealing from the best sites in the set. First, the donate button lives in the header on every page, in a colour used for nothing else, so it is never more than one click away. Second, the footer does trust work: the registration or EIN number, a link to the annual report and a plain statement of where the money goes. Funders and major donors scroll to the bottom; give them what they are looking for.

Designing the donation path

Whichever donation tool you use, the design principles are the same:

• One page, short form. Amount, payment, email, done. Ask for an address only if you need it for tax receipts or Gift Aid.
• Suggested amounts with a sentence each about what that amount does, plus an “other amount” field.
• A monthly option next to one-time, presented as a choice rather than a pre-ticked box.
• Wallet payments such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which most modern processors support and which shorten checkout on phones.
• No exits. Strip the sidebar, the news feed and the pop-ups from the donation page.
• A thank-you page with a next step: share the campaign, join the newsletter or sign up to volunteer, while the donor is most engaged.
• Never store card numbers yourself. Let a PCI-compliant processor handle payment data, whether the form is embedded or hosted.

On Drupal, the usual routes are an embedded form from your donation platform, Stripe Webform for simple one-off and recurring gifts, or Webform CiviCRM when gifts need to land in a CRM record alongside memberships and event bookings.

Accessibility is not optional

Two thirds of the projects above mention accessibility because it touches everything: colour contrast on the donate button, keyboard access to forms, captions on campaign videos, alt text on impact photos and headings that make sense to a screen reader. Design to WCAG 2.1 AA, test with real assistive technology before launch, and build it into the templates rather than fixing pages one by one afterwards. It is far cheaper at the design stage than as a retrofit.

Which platform fits your nonprofit?

Be honest about the size of the job. A small organisation with one part-time communications person and a simple story is well served by a website builder or a lean WordPress site, and should spend the difference on content and photography. WordPress is the sensible default for regular publishing, an events list and a blog, as long as someone owns updates and the plugin count stays under control.

Drupal earns its place when the website is closer to a platform: logged-in members, case management, many languages, strict editorial roles, or a network of sites sharing one codebase. That is exactly the profile of the larger organisations in the case-study set, such as UNICEF, Save the Children and Lions Clubs International. Its roles, permissions and multilingual support are in core, and CRM integration is well trodden through CiviCRM Entity, Webform CiviCRM and the Salesforce Suite, all of which support Drupal 10 and 11.

Make the site work with Google Ad Grants

Through Google Ad Grants, eligible nonprofits get up to $10,000 a month in search ads on Google. To qualify and stay qualified, the website itself has to meet Google’s quality policy: original content about the mission, a secure (HTTPS) site that works properly, and clear pages for the actions you want people to take. Design has a direct role here. Each campaign needs a landing page that answers one search and asks for one action, and conversion tracking on gifts, volunteer sign-ups and newsletter subscriptions so you can show the grant is doing something.

What it costs

A nonprofit website costs what any website of the same scope costs; the difference is in where you choose to spend. Our web design cost breakdown splits a typical 12-page site into the ten lines the money goes to, and the small business website cost guide covers the tiers from builder to agency. For nonprofits the lines most worth protecting are discovery (so the site is built around how supporters actually arrive), copy, accessibility testing and the donation path.

If you are planning a rebuild or a move off Drupal 7, send us the site and we will come back with a plan and a fixed price. Our website design and Drupal migration pages describe what each includes.

Sources

• drupal.org case studies: 84 tagged Non-profit, October 2024 to October 2026, coded by Gspikes in October 2026
• Google Ad Grants and its eligibility requirements
• drupal.org project pages for Stripe Webform, Webform CiviCRM, CiviCRM Entity and Salesforce Suite (compatibility checked October 2026)