Performance & Accessibility for Nonprofits

Performance & accessibility for nonprofits comes down to one question: can every supporter who decides to give actually finish giving? It covers faster donation pages, accessible donation forms, lighter program and story pages, and annual reports published as readable web pages rather than large PDFs. For a charity, the donation form is the point where months of storytelling, email and events either turn into revenue or quietly leak away.

This guide matters to executive directors who have to justify every dollar of overhead, development directors who own the giving numbers, communications teams who publish the stories, and the small web teams or volunteers who keep the site running. Nonprofit supporters include many older people using larger text and screen magnifiers, people who give from a phone in the few minutes after reading an appeal, and people using screen readers, voice control or a keyboard alone. A donation form that fails any of them costs a gift that was already decided.

Rather than a list of general principles, this page follows one illustrative project from first conversation to measured result. The organization, its numbers and its outcomes are invented for the purpose of explanation, and they are labeled that way throughout. The problems, the rules and the methods are the real ones nonprofits deal with.

The illustrative organization and the question it started with

Picture a regional literacy nonprofit with a small staff: an executive director, a development director, a communications manager, and a part-time contractor who maintains the website. It runs after-school tutoring and adult reading programs, publishes a story page for each program, and raises most of its individual giving online, with the largest share arriving in the last six weeks of the calendar year.

Its donation form is embedded from a third-party giving platform. Nobody on staff chose that platform with accessibility in mind, and nobody has tested the embedded form since it went live. The homepage opens with an autoplaying video of a tutoring session. The annual report is a designed PDF that runs to many pages and is linked from the footer.

The development director brought the question that started the project. The giving platform's dashboard showed many more people starting the donation form than finishing it, and the gap looked larger on phones. She wanted to know whether the problem was the appeal, the audience or the form itself, and she wanted an answer before the year-end giving season rather than after it.

That framing is typical, and it is the right one. Every dollar spent on overhead is scrutinized in the nonprofit sector, and donation conversion is the whole game. A performance and accessibility project earns its place when it is tied directly to completed gifts, not to a generic compliance score.

What nonprofits are dealing with

Before looking at the project itself, it helps to name the pressures that shape any nonprofit web work. They explain why the fixes in this example were prioritized the way they were.

Overhead scrutiny

Boards, funders and donors watch administrative and fundraising costs. Web work has to show that it pays for itself in gifts or in program reach. That favors short, targeted projects over large redesigns, and it favors fixes to the pages that carry money over polish on pages that do not.

An older, mixed-ability supporter base

Many loyal donors are older. They are more likely to browse with enlarged text, operating-system zoom or a screen magnifier, and less likely to tolerate small tap targets or low-contrast gray text. When a page is magnified, only part of it is visible at a time, so an error message that appears at the top of a long form can go completely unseen.

Mobile, impulse and emotion

A large share of giving decisions happen on a phone, prompted by an email, a text or a social post. The supporter is moved to act now. Every second the page spends loading, and every field that fights with autofill, gives that impulse time to fade.

Third-party giving platforms

Most small and mid-sized nonprofits use a hosted giving platform rather than building their own forms. That is usually a sensible decision, but it means the most important form on the site is code the nonprofit does not control. It is often slow on phones and fails basic accessibility checks, at the exact moment someone wants to give.

Content made to move people

Nonprofits rely on storytelling video, photography, audio and designed reports. Those are also the heaviest assets on the web and the ones most likely to be published without captions, alternative text or a readable text version.

The rules around the donation page

Accessibility and performance work on a nonprofit site sits alongside fundraising regulation, and a supplier should understand where the two meet. This is a practical note, not legal advice; your counsel and your registration adviser decide how these rules apply to you.

Charitable solicitation registration

Most states require charitable solicitation registration before you fundraise in them. Online giving can trigger that requirement in states whose residents you specifically target, or from which donations arrive on a repeated and ongoing basis or in substantial volume. The multistate Charleston Principles, developed by state charity regulators, set out how regulators usually read internet solicitation. For the website this has practical consequences: state disclosure statements that some states require on solicitation materials need to be present and readable on the donation page, not buried in an image or a PDF, and geo-targeted campaigns should be checked against where you are registered.

IRS acknowledgment and quid pro quo disclosure

The IRS governs written acknowledgment and quid pro quo disclosure for contributions. Donors need a written acknowledgment for contributions above the IRS threshold before they can claim a deduction, and when a donor receives something in return, such as a gala dinner or a premium, the organization must disclose a good-faith estimate of its value when the payment exceeds the IRS threshold for quid pro quo contributions. On the web, that means the confirmation page and the receipt email are part of the donation flow and must be accessible too: a receipt sent as an image-only attachment, or a confirmation screen a screen reader cannot read, fails the donor at the point the IRS rules care about.

Section 504 for federally funded programs

A program that receives federal funding takes on accessibility obligations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits disability discrimination by recipients of federal financial assistance. For a nonprofit with federal grants, that reaches program information, enrollment forms and services delivered online, not only the fundraising pages. Many nonprofits use WCAG 2.2 Level AA as the working standard to meet these obligations; WCAG 2.2 is the current version of the guidelines.

Beyond the US

Organizations that fundraise or deliver services in Europe should also be aware of the European Accessibility Act, which applies to certain products and services, including some online transactions, and should take advice on whether their donation or service flows fall within its scope.

Week one: measuring the starting point

A project that is going to be judged on completed gifts needs a baseline measured the same way the result will be. In the illustrative project, the first week was spent on measurement, not fixes.

The funnel the development director could check

The sign-off in a nonprofit usually belongs to a development director who can compare completed donations against people who started the form. That comparison became the primary measure. The giving platform recorded form starts and completed gifts; the site's analytics recorded visits to the donation page. Together they gave three rates: visitors who started the form, starters who completed a gift, and completions split by phone and desktop.

Speed from real supporters, not a lab

Real-user Core Web Vitals were pulled for the donation page, the homepage and the program pages. Largest Contentful Paint shows how quickly the main content appears, Cumulative Layout Shift shows how much the page jumps, and Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024, shows how quickly the page responds when someone taps an amount button or types in a field. Lab tests on a mid-range phone with a throttled connection filled in where real-user data was thin.

An accessibility baseline on the paths that carry money

The audit scope was deliberately narrow: the homepage, one program story, the donation form from amount selection to confirmation, the receipt email, the event registration form and the annual report. Each was tested with automated checks, then manually with a keyboard, a screen reader, text enlarged to double size and reflowed on a narrow viewport, and a screen magnifier. If you want a sense of how audits like this are scoped and priced, see how much an accessibility audit costs.

What the audit found

The findings below are the kinds of issues that appear again and again on nonprofit sites. In the illustrative project they were grouped by where they sat in the donor's path, because that is how the development director needed to see them.

On the donation form

• Amount buttons that were not buttons. The preset gift amounts were styled links with no selected state announced to screen readers, and the custom amount field had placeholder text but no label.
• Labels that disappeared. Field names lived inside the fields as placeholders, so they vanished as soon as a donor typed, which is hard for anyone and especially hard for older donors and people with memory or attention difficulties.
• Errors in red only, at the top. A failed submission showed a red banner at the top of the form. A donor using magnification never saw it, and a screen reader did not announce it.
• No autocomplete. Name, email, address and card fields lacked the autocomplete attributes that let browsers and password managers fill them, which slows every donor and fails the WCAG criterion on identifying input purpose. The detail is covered in our guide to input purpose and autocomplete.
• Keyboard traps in the payment frame. The card fields sat in an embedded payment frame with no accessible name, and focus could not leave it without a mouse.
• Small targets. The monthly-versus-one-time toggle and the cover-the-fees checkbox were well below the minimum target size introduced in WCAG 2.2.
• A session timeout with no warning. Donors who paused to find a card were sent back to the start with no chance to extend the time.

On the homepage and program stories

• Autoplaying video with sound on some browsers. Audio that plays automatically for more than three seconds needs a way to pause or mute it; beyond compliance, it drowns out screen reader speech. Our note on autoplaying audio control sets out the patterns that work.
• Heavy story pages. Program stories used full-resolution photographs and loaded the video player library on every page, whether or not a video appeared.
• Images of text. Impact figures and donor quotes were published as designed images, invisible to screen readers and blurry when enlarged.
• Vague page titles. Several program pages shared the same title, so screen reader users and people with many tabs open could not tell them apart.

On the annual report

The annual report PDF was untagged, so a screen reader read it as one unstructured stream, and its financial tables had no header cells. On a phone it had to be pinched and scrolled in two directions. It was also the heaviest single file on the site, downloaded by funders and major donors, the audience the organization most wanted to impress.

On the confirmation and receipt

The confirmation page announced success only with a graphic, and the receipt email was mostly an image with the acknowledgment wording embedded in it. Both had to be rebuilt as text, both for accessibility and so that the acknowledgment the IRS expects is readable by every donor.

The fix plan and how the work ran

With a fixed budget and a fixed deadline, the plan ranked every issue by two questions: does it stop someone finishing a gift, and can it be fixed before the year-end season? Issues that were both went first. The process ran in eight steps.

Rebuilding the donation form

The donation form is where the project either succeeds or does not. In the illustrative case, the giving platform allowed a newer form template that fixed some issues, and the vendor fixed the payment frame's accessible name after a documented report. The remaining issues were handled with configuration and a small amount of custom styling the platform permitted.

What a good nonprofit donation form does

• Uses real buttons or radio inputs for gift amounts, with the selected amount announced and visible without relying on color alone.
• Gives every field a visible label that stays in place, with hints, such as why a phone number is requested, placed next to the field.
• Uses autocomplete on name, email, address and payment fields, and offers digital wallets where the platform supports them, since they remove typing altogether.
• Shows errors next to the field that caused them, in text, and moves focus to a summary that links to each error so screen reader and magnifier users find them.
• Keeps focus visible throughout, including inside payment frames, and never hides it under a sticky banner.
• Warns before a session times out and lets the donor extend it.
• Does not ask for the same information twice, which WCAG 2.2 addresses under redundant entry, for example when billing and mailing addresses match.
• Presents any required state disclosure and the organization's details as text on the page.
• Ends on a confirmation page with a text heading that says the gift succeeded, and sends a text receipt that carries the acknowledgment wording.

When to replace rather than repair

If a platform's form cannot be made keyboard-operable, or the vendor will not commit to fixing blocking issues, replacing the form is usually cheaper than losing gifts for another season. Ask vendors for an Accessibility Conformance Report before you switch; our guide to VPATs and Accessibility Conformance Reports explains how to read one critically, because a report is a claim to test, not a guarantee. The design side of the form, from amount ladders to the monthly-giving prompt, is covered on our page about UI and UX design for nonprofits.

Lighter program and story pages

Story pages rarely take the gift themselves, but they send most of the traffic to the page that does. If they load slowly on a phone, fewer people reach the form at all.

Video that waits to be asked

The illustrative homepage replaced its autoplaying video with a still frame and a play button that loads the player only when pressed. The video gained corrected captions and a short text summary beneath it, so the story still lands for someone who cannot or will not play video. Nonprofit storytelling video is powerful, and captioning and description belong in the production brief rather than being added later; that is part of our video editing and production for nonprofits work.

Images and text

Photographs were exported at the sizes actually displayed, in modern formats, with dimensions set so the page did not jump while loading. Impact figures that had been images were rebuilt as text, which made them readable by screen readers, sharp at any zoom level and indexable by search engines. Each photograph received alternative text describing what matters in the story, not a list of objects.

Scripts nobody needed

Over the years the site had gathered tracking pixels, a chat widget nobody staffed, two analytics tools and a social feed plugin. Each loaded on every page. Removing what was unused, and loading the rest only where it was needed, was the single largest speed gain on the story pages. For more on this pattern across publishing sites, see performance for content sites.

The annual report as readable pages

Annual reports are where nonprofits make their case to funders and major donors, and where they most often publish a large, inaccessible PDF. The illustrative project republished the report as a short set of web pages: a summary page with the headline story, a page per program, a financials page with real HTML tables, and a page thanking supporters.

• Headings and structure: each section gets a real heading, so screen reader users can jump between programs and financials.
• Tables, not pictures of tables: revenue and expense tables use header cells and captions, and reflow or scroll sensibly on a phone.
• Charts with a text equivalent: every chart is accompanied by a sentence stating what it shows and a data table.
• A tagged PDF as a secondary option: for board members who want to print, the PDF is still offered, but it is tagged, and it is no longer the only way to read the report.
• Shareable sections: each program page has its own address, so staff can link a funder directly to the relevant program.

Short motion pieces that summarize the year work well at the top of a report page, provided they are captioned, can be paused and respect reduced-motion settings, which is easiest when accessibility is planned in the storyboard rather than added afterward.

Timing the work against year-end giving

Nonprofit web work has a clear calendar. The work should be tested before the year-end giving season, when a slow or broken donation page costs more than at any other time. Traffic and gifts concentrate around Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after US Thanksgiving, and in the last days of December, when donors give before the tax year closes. A form that breaks on December 30 cannot be fixed in time to recover those gifts.

Spring gala season and any emergency appeals create smaller peaks that deserve the same pre-send test, especially event registration forms that combine ticket purchase with a gift and therefore carry quid pro quo disclosure.

The measured result

In the illustrative project, the development director compared the same measures across the same weeks of the season with the baseline. The figures below are illustrative and exist to show how a result should be reported: same measure, same method, split by device, with the caveat that other factors, such as the strength of the appeal, also changed.

Reading the result honestly

In this example, for every 1,000 people who started the form, 120 more completed a gift than at baseline (530 minus 410). On phones the difference was 180 in every 1,000 (500 minus 320), which fits what the audit found: the phone experience had the worst speed and the most blocking issues. The 2.5-second mark matters because it is the threshold Google describes as good for Largest Contentful Paint. The organization should not claim that all of the change came from the web work, because appeals, audience and timing also varied. What it can say is that the form stopped failing people who had already decided to give, and it can show the device split that points to why.

Measures to keep watching

• Completed gifts per 1,000 form starters, by device, week by week through each season.
• Real-user Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift on the donation page and top story pages.
• Open accessibility issues on the donation flow, retested after every platform update.
• Donor support contacts about the form, such as "my gift did not go through."
• Views of the annual report pages compared with past downloads of the PDF.

What drives cost, and how to brief a supplier

Performance and accessibility work starts at $1,200.00 per audit with us. That is a starting price rather than a fixed fee. The pricing page puts every rate next to what the US market typically charges, and a quote turns the range into one number for your volume.

What moves the number for a nonprofit

• How many distinct forms you run: one donation form costs less to audit than separate forms for donations, events, memberships, volunteer sign-up and program enrollment.
• How much of the flow a vendor controls: hosted forms limit what can be fixed directly, so part of the work becomes documenting issues for the vendor and retesting their changes.
• The state of the CMS theme: a theme with years of plugins takes longer to lighten than a recent, lean one.
• Documents and media: the length of the annual report, the number of other PDFs, and the hours of video that need captions.
• Timing: work squeezed into November competes with campaign deadlines and leaves no room to switch vendors.

Small teams have to choose carefully where to spend limited time. The order in this example, donation flow first, then the pages that feed it, then documents, is a sensible default for most organizations.

If you want to see how a supplier treats your material before committing, you can send a couple of your own files, such as a page from the annual report and a program story, and judge the result for yourself.

Related

Other work for nonprofits

• UI & UX Design for Nonprofits
• Video Editing & Production for Nonprofits
• Motion Graphics & Animation for Nonprofits
• Audio Editing & Production for Nonprofits

Performance & accessibility in other sectors

• Performance & Accessibility for Hotels and hospitality
• Performance & Accessibility for Restaurants and food service
• Performance & Accessibility for Travel and tourism
• Performance & Accessibility for Events and venues

More on performance & accessibility

• How the work runs, what it costs and how we check it
• Input Purpose and Autocomplete: The Decisions That Matter
• Autoplaying Audio Control: What Actually Works

Trying us out

The quickest way to find out if we are any good for you is to send a couple of your own files and look at what comes back. It is free and there is no card involved. If the scope is already clear, ask for a fixed price instead.