Last updated: September 2026.
Education Elevated has funded a school in Chyangba Village, in Nepal’s Solukhumbu district, since 2007, after a Rotary hike in Colorado introduced its founder to a man who grew up there. Sponsors pledge money for every vertical foot a trekking team climbs, so a mountain does part of the fundraising, and teams have walked to Everest Base Camp and on to Chyangba every year since 2008. Twenty girls now board at the school’s dormitory, and fifty-six children attend its primary classes each year.
This year we rebuilt educationelevated.org, the August 2026 selection of our free website for nonprofits program. What follows are the eight nonprofit website changes that mattered most for giving, in the order a first-time visitor meets them, and how to check whether your own site does the same.
This is not a portfolio piece. It’s the checklist behind every nonprofit marketing agency project we take on, tested here on one real site, with the numbers to check our own work. The full case study has the visuals; this is the reasoning behind each one.
Where does the money go?
On the old site, nineteen years of expeditions, projects and photographs sat across pages that did not lead anywhere in particular. Someone arrived willing to give and had no obvious next step toward understanding how their gift would be used.
The first of these nonprofit website changes answers the question on the rebuilt homepage in three steps, in the order it actually happens: a team joins an expedition, sponsors back every vertical foot climbed, and Chyangba gets built. No mission statement first, no appeal to guilt, just the mechanism.
A trailhead sign lists the route before it explains why the mountain is worth climbing. The new homepage works the same way: the steps come before the sentiment.
It matters in the first ten seconds because that unspoken question, where does my money go, is the one most donors ask before they read anything else on a nonprofit site. Answer it late and most visitors never see the answer at all.
Check your own site: Open your homepage in a private browser window and time how long it takes to find what happens to a donation. If the answer requires scrolling past a hero image and a mission statement, most first-time visitors will not stay for it.
Giving is on every page, without shouting
A route to give existed on the old site, but reaching it depended entirely on which page a visitor happened to land on.
On the rebuilt site, giving is present on every page without shouting: a project page, a photo album and a news post all carry the same route to give as the homepage does.
A donor rarely decides to give on the homepage, which is why nonprofit website changes cannot stop there. The moment usually arrives after a project page, a photograph or a piece of news, and if the path to give does not exist wherever that moment happens, it is lost along with it. A donate link buried one template away from where the decision actually forms might as well not exist.
Check your own site: Click into a project page, a blog post and a contact page on your own site. Time how long it takes to find a way to give from each one without returning to the homepage first.
Tell the story in the order a newcomer needs it
Before the rebuild, a newcomer had no set path through everything the organization had ever published. All of it was available; nothing pointed to what to read first.
The new site leads with the mechanism, then the origin (a Rotary hike introduced the founder to a man who grew up in Chyangba), then the deeper record for anyone who wants it. Each layer earns the next one.
A first-time visitor decides whether to trust an organization in seconds, long before they would ever scroll to an origin story. Put that story first and most people never reach the part that would move them to give. Put it second and it does its work for the visitors who stay.
Check your own site: Ask someone unfamiliar with your work to read your homepage for fifteen seconds, then explain back who you help and how. If they cannot, begin your nonprofit website changes by moving sentences before you add more of them.
Turn nineteen years of projects into evidence
Nineteen years of expeditions, projects and photographs existed before the rebuild. They were simply not organized into anything a visitor could follow from one to the next.
After the nonprofit website changes, project pages document the schools, teachers and dormitories those vertical feet have paid for, and photo albums from 2008 to 2026 sit beside the news. Nineteen years of material stops being an archive and starts being the proof.
Nineteen years of expeditions is a fossil record: each layer only proves something once it is exposed, dated and labeled. Sorted this way, that same record becomes the strongest argument the organization has, stronger than any single appeal.
It matters because trust in a nonprofit is cumulative. A donor weighing two organizations is not looking for a promise about the future. They are looking for proof that a past gift did what it said it would, and a dated photograph does that work better than a paragraph of adjectives.
Check your own site: Find the oldest completed project on your own website. If it takes more than three clicks, or if it has no date and no photograph, it is a memory, not evidence yet.
Curious where your own site stands before you make any nonprofit website changes? Send us your website and get a plan and a quote within 24 hours.
Leave room for the appeal nobody planned
The old site had no dedicated space for a message that needs to appear on short notice and disappear once the moment passes.
The nonprofit website changes added that space: an emergency appeal can now take over the top of the site when one is needed, as with the 2026 Nepal flood relief, and come off again without a developer. The banner running today explains, in two sentences, that flash floods hit a river valley elsewhere in Nepal in August 2026 and that Chyangba itself was spared.
An emergency appeal is triage: the same site treating a different kind of urgency for as long as the urgency lasts, then returning to its normal shape.
It matters because the circumstances that call for an urgent appeal are, by definition, unplanned. If raising one requires a developer or a week of lead time, the window when people are most willing to give has usually closed before the message goes up.
Check your own site: Ask whoever manages your website how many hours it would take to put an urgent message across your homepage tomorrow morning. If the honest answer involves a developer or a support ticket, that is not a system. It is a hope.
Measure speed on a phone, and write down the number
Mobile performance on Google PageSpeed Insights measured 65 on 30 August, against the site before the rebuild. The same tool, same mobile mode, measured 94 on 10 September, against the rebuilt site. Anyone can rerun it.
| Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile | Before (30 Aug) | After (10 Sep) |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 65 | 94 |
| Accessibility | 90 | 100 |
| Best practices | 100 | 100 |
| SEO | 100 | 100 |
Performance work is engineering, not decoration: measure a load, change one member, measure again. Twenty-nine points on a phone is the difference between a page that finishes loading and one a visitor has already left.
Most giving happens in whatever spare minute a donor has, and that minute is usually on a phone. A slow homepage spends it loading instead of explaining where the money goes, no matter what other nonprofit website changes sit behind it.
Check your own site: Run your own homepage through PageSpeed Insights in mobile mode today and write down the number. Fix one thing. Run it again in a month. That is the entire method used here.
Make accessibility a score, not a guess
The accessibility score was 90 before the nonprofit website changes, high enough to hide the gap between working for most visitors and working for everyone.
It now reads 100. On the live site today, every photograph that carries meaning has a written description for a screen reader, and the handful marked decorative are labeled so a screen reader skips them on purpose instead of reading a filename out loud.
It matters because a grant reviewer or a donor using a screen reader either gets the same information as everyone else, or gets nothing. There is no partial credit at the level of a single untagged image.
Check your own site: Turn on your phone’s screen reader for two minutes (VoiceOver on iPhone, TalkBack on Android) and try to find your own donate button using only sound. Or run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and read the accessibility number by itself; anything under 100 points to something specific and fixable.
Hand over a site the staff can run alone
The site runs on green hosting verified by the Green Web Foundation, and it was handed over unlocked. The team publishes news, albums and emergency appeals themselves, without calling anyone for something as small as one new photo.
A nonprofit’s staff is often one or two people covering five roles. Waiting on an outside vendor to post a thank-you photo or update a page becomes, in practice, a bottleneck built into who holds the keys.
Whether that team runs the site in-house once the nonprofit website changes are live, or stays supported by an outside partner, is a separate decision, one we lay out in our in-house vs agency guide.
“I would highly recommend Planet Media for any website design and programming work. They gave us a fresh look and made the back end a joy to work with.”
Bruce Ward, Chairman, Education Elevated
You can check your own host the same way we checked this one, in about the time it takes a page to load, with our website carbon checker.
Check your own site: Log in to your own website’s back end and try to publish one new photo and one paragraph of news, timed, without opening a support ticket. If you cannot, the handover was never finished.
Check your own site for these nonprofit website changes
Eight changes, eight ways to check them, in the same order a first-time visitor meets them:
- Time how long it takes a stranger to find where a donation goes, starting from your homepage.
- Click into a project page, a blog post and a contact page, and look for a way to give from each.
- Ask someone unfamiliar with your work to explain, in one sentence, who you help and how, after fifteen seconds on your homepage.
- Find your oldest completed project in under three clicks, and confirm it is dated and photographed.
- Ask how many hours it would take to post an urgent message across your homepage tomorrow.
- Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, mobile mode, and write down the number.
- Turn on your phone’s screen reader for two minutes and try to find your donate button by sound alone.
- Log in and publish one photo and one paragraph, timed, without calling anyone.
None of this requires a redesign to try this week. It requires opening your own site the way a first-time donor would, which is the one way most staff never look at it.
If your list turns up more nonprofit website changes than you can make alone, that is exactly what our nonprofit marketing services page is for.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single change that matters most for a nonprofit’s giving page?
Putting the funding model in the first screen. A donor’s first unspoken question is where the money goes, and answering it before anything else does more for that decision than any appeal to emotion.
Do we need a full redesign to make these nonprofit website changes, or can we do them on our existing site?
Several do not require a rebuild: adding a route to give on every page, running your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, or checking your own accessibility with a screen reader can happen this week. A full rebuild matters most when the story itself, not just the layout, is told out of order.
How do we know if our nonprofit website’s accessibility is good enough?
Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and read the accessibility score by itself. Unlike a design opinion, that number always points to something specific: a missing description, low contrast, an unlabeled button. Fix what it names, then run it again.
Does site speed on a phone actually change whether someone donates?
It changes whether they see the page at all. Most giving happens in a spare minute on a phone, and a slow homepage spends that minute loading instead of explaining where a gift goes.
What does handing a site over unlocked mean in practice?
The nonprofit owns the domain, the hosting and the content from day one, and its own staff can publish a photo or a news update without calling a developer. A team that has to wait on an outside vendor for small updates will simply stop updating.
Can our nonprofit get a website built this way for free?
One organization is selected every month through our free website for nonprofits program, self-nominations included. Outside that program, our nonprofit marketing agencies comparison can help you evaluate who else does this work.
Kurt Whitt
Planet Media
Founder and CEO of Planet Media, a sustainability focused marketing agency. 25+ years helping purpose driven brands grow through strategy, storytelling and design.
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