Updated September 2026.
Your nonprofit's website is a hub for all information about your organization, including everything from donations to event signups. It should be full of meaningful content that draws long-time supporters, recurring donors, and newcomers to your cause. However, meeting the evolving needs of these audiences requires constant changes and growth.
A website growth plan is a strategy for growing your website sustainably over time. It replaces the scattered, one-page-at-a-time changes most sites accumulate with a deliberate approach that adds up to real improvement. Keep these four tips in mind when developing your growth plan.
In This Guide
Top nonprofit websites aren't static. If your website hasn't been revisited by its designer in a while, it probably won't be visited by many potential supporters, either. A robust growth plan will enable your nonprofit to make continual adjustments that add up to significant positive changes.
1. Determine Your Goal
Before you make any changes to your website, identify your optimization goals. What are you hoping to accomplish with your website? What areas are successful, and what can be improved based on this goal? Your website refresh may target the following objectives.
Usability and Design Updates
Do your donation pages make donating easy? Is the site menu easy to navigate? Website visitors won't stay long if they can't find the information they need, so you may need to refresh your website to improve the user experience.
Similarly, the content on your website should be helpful and answer any questions users may have. For example, landing pages for fundraisers or events should be thorough and informative. Refresh your content every few months to keep it relevant and up to date.
Navigability and relevant information are helpful, but your website should also be eye-catching. Updating the visual elements of each page and incorporating your unique branding can make your site more appealing.
Content Strategy
Developing a strategy for your website's content can help ensure that every page supports your mission. Consider the story you want to tell, the tone that your messaging should take, and the themes you want to emphasize. You might do this through:
- Educational blog posts
- Webinars and panels
- Social media posts
- Videos
Refresh your content to contextualize your work and mission. As your mission expands or you achieve certain goals, update your website to reflect these changes.
Accessibility
Does every visitor to your website have equal access to its information? You might need to refresh your website to ensure it meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by making key accessibility updates, such as adding descriptive alt text for images, maintaining sufficient color contrast for text legibility, ensuring full keyboard navigation, and providing clear labels for forms and buttons.
SEO
Using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, you can increase your website's visibility by structuring your content to meet internet search queries more directly. Consider refreshing your website to make the content apply to a broader audience. This will help your website get attention from anyone searching for specific keywords, rather than from your supporters searching for your nonprofit.
GEO
Generative engine optimization ensures your nonprofit gets cited directly when potential donors and volunteers ask AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini for advice. Instead of just optimizing for keywords, focus on providing clear, authoritative answers and structured impact data on your site. This allows AI engines to easily digest your content and recommend your organization to people searching for solutions in your cause area. The same discipline pays off elsewhere, too: clean, well-structured data is what makes AI-powered fundraising work.
Personalized Web Content
Implementing personalized web content allows you to tailor the digital experience to the visitor. By displaying dynamic calls to action or impact stories based on whether a visitor is a first-time donor, a returning volunteer, or a corporate sponsor, you make your mission immediately relevant to their specific interests. This targeted approach deepens visitor engagement and helps convert casual site traffic into dedicated, long-term support.
Transitioning to a New CMS
Have you avoided a website refresh because web design is too complicated? Maybe your CMS doesn't offer the functionality you need to implement an optimized design. If your CMS isn't working for you, consider switching to a new one.
Kanopi's comparison of the top platforms, WordPress and Drupal, explains that choosing a new CMS requires determining which system best fits your organization's unique needs. This will likely be a major project that requires a developer's help. Moving all your information to a new CMS is a time-consuming and delicate process. By enlisting a professional developer's assistance, you can ensure you manage the transition as efficiently and securely as possible.
Migrating to a New CMS Version
Maybe you like your CMS, but your current version is becoming obsolete. In this case, it's helpful to update your website as soon as possible. For example, Drupal 10's end-of-life date is December 2026, so it's recommended to migrate your website to Drupal 11 before then.
Choose one primary goal to start. A refresh that tries to fix usability, SEO, accessibility, and a CMS migration all at once tends to stall. Pick the objective with the biggest gap between where your site is and where it needs to be, and if you're targeting more than one, bring in a web development professional to help sequence the work.
2. Research Your Audience
Your website exists to serve your audience, so research your audience and their needs when creating a plan for the future. This research could include:
Developing audience profiles
Consider who your audience is and group them by characteristics relevant to their involvement in your cause. This makes it easier to tailor your website to their specific needs.
Mapping the user journey
User journeys are the actions visitors take on your website to find the information they're looking for. Make sure the journey is streamlined and intuitive for each of your audience groups.
Referencing UX best practices
Optimize your nonprofit's website design for user experience by streamlining your mobile version and minimizing page load time.
Reviewing your supporter data
Your CRM already shows which audiences give, volunteer, and attend events. Use those patterns to decide which journeys deserve the most attention in your refresh.
Narrowing down your target audience will help you assess how well you're meeting your audience's needs and what you can improve to better appeal to their interests.
3. Align Your Digital Strategy Across Platforms
How will your website fit into your digital marketing strategy as a whole? Determine how your website will work with other channels and campaigns, such as:
- Social media. Your website can supplement the relationship-building strength of social media. For example, you might feature a live Instagram feed on your homepage that displays posts with your organization's unique hashtag.
- Email. You might communicate with your donors via email, but your website can reach an audience that hasn't committed to your email list yet.
- Online ads. Consider placing ads online, especially free options such as Google Ad Grants for nonprofits. Drive traffic to important website pages, such as your online donation form or volunteer sign-up page.
- Virtual events. Make your next fundraising event virtual to boost engagement, reach a wider audience, and lower event costs. Use your website to promote and host your livestreamed virtual experience.
By aligning your digital strategy, you can promote a uniform brand image across multiple platforms. Not only will this reinforce your nonprofit's message, but it can also foster a broader digital audience. It also helps to keep the data flowing in one direction: when the forms on your site record gifts, registrations, and advocacy actions straight into your CRM, every channel is working from the same picture of each supporter's engagement.
Soapbox Engage forms sync every donation, registration, and petition signature to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics in real time, so the pages on your website feed your CRM directly instead of piling up in exports to reconcile later.
4. Consider Working With a Website Development Partner
If you've identified clear goals for your website and the audience you're trying to reach, but don't know how to put your plans into action, look into hiring a website development partner. These professionals can offer services like:
- A deep dive into your website to review your code and structure
- Personalized growth recommendations
- Management of website migrations, such as upgrading to a newer version of Drupal
- Website optimization for long-term growth by giving your team a blueprint to follow for future updates
Delegating this task to a website development partner can be efficient in two ways: the website will be professionally optimized, and your time will be freed to focus solely on your nonprofit's work.
The Growth Plan at a Glance
Final Thoughts
As you consider ways to grow your nonprofit's website, focus on the goal of amplifying your advocacy through digital presence and the tools you can use to reach your audience. There are countless ways to cater your website to the specific growth goals for your nonprofit. If you're not sure where to start, reach out to a professional for more help.
Let Your Website Feed Your CRM Directly
Soapbox Engage connects donation forms, event registration, petitions, and directories to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics in real time, so the pages you build during a website refresh keep your supporter data current from the moment someone acts.
Start a Trial Talk to an Expert
Donations
Events
Petitions
Forms
Shop
Directories