Common questions

It depends on three things more than anything else: how many pages carry real written content, whether donations run through a processor you already have, and whether staff will maintain the site themselves afterward. A small brochure site and a site wired into a donor database are different projects. Ask for a quote against a written scope rather than a page count.

Published rates across the industry range from a few hundred dollars for a template fill-in to five figures for custom work with integrations. The number on its own tells you very little. What matters is what is included: who writes the content, who migrates existing material, and who is responsible when something breaks later.

The builder matters less than who maintains it. A well-kept WordPress site outperforms a neglected custom build, and a simple static site outperforms an expensive platform nobody on staff can log into. Choose for whoever will be updating it in eighteen months.

Wix offers discounted plans to registered nonprofits and free tiers exist across most builders. A free tier generally means platform branding, a subdomain rather than your own domain, and constraints on donation tooling. For an organization asking the public for money, owning the domain is usually worth the cost.

The term covers paid advertising, social media, content writing and technical search work, and agencies often do not specify which of those they are strong at. A useful filter is to ask which single channel they expect results from and what the first ninety days produce.

Most work on open-ended monthly retainers, which suits the agency more than a small client. A defined piece of work with a defined end is usually better value for a small organization, with continued spending justified by evidence that the first round worked.

For a local organization, whichever one will show you the data behind its recommendations. A proposal that does not name the specific search terms it targets, with their volume and how contested they are, is guessing. That data is inexpensive and any competent provider can produce it.

Yes, though most of the work is replacement rather than new construction. Almost every organization already has a site. The demand is for rebuilding things that have become slow, unreadable on a phone, or impossible for current staff to edit.

The working assumption that a first-time visitor decides whether to stay within roughly three seconds. It is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement, but the underlying point holds: if the page does not make its purpose obvious immediately, most people leave rather than investigate.

Content, context, community, customization, communication, connection and commerce. It is a checklist for prompting discussion rather than a standard to meet. For most mission-driven organizations, content and communication account for nearly all of the value.

It refers to a public support threshold in United States tax rules, broadly that a public charity should receive around a third of its support from the general public rather than a few large sources. It is a legal and accounting matter, so confirm the specifics with your accountant. Its technical consequence is that donation records need to be captured properly.

The general observation that most funding comes from a minority of donors. Practically, it means donor records deserve more care than small organizations usually give them, because losing the history behind a major relationship during a software migration is costly and hard to notice until it matters.