Imperial
Start with audience and main tasks
List who arrives and what each group came to do. A prospective donor, a service user, a volunteer and a funder are looking for different things, and a homepage that serves none of them well usually serves all four badly.
Mission and programme clarity
A visitor should be able to say what you do, who you serve and where, without scrolling for it. Programme pages should describe the actual activity rather than the aspiration.
Credibility and governance information
Registration details, leadership, contact routes and reporting all make an organization assessable. This is the information a cautious first-time donor looks for and often cannot find.
Give the giving a purpose
A donation prompt attached to a specific, costed need performs a different job than a generic one. Say what the gift does.
Mobile navigation
Most of this journey happens on a phone. Test the real path from arrival to completed gift on a phone, on a normal connection, before approving a design.
Accessible forms
Persistent labels, useful validation messages, visible keyboard focus, adequate target sizes and a layout that reflows. WCAG 2.2 AA is the target to design against.
Payment options actually supported
Confirm which methods your chosen platform genuinely supports in your country, and what each costs you. Design against the platform's current documentation rather than its marketing page.
Confirmation and receipts
The gift is not complete at payment. It completes at a confirmation the donor trusts and a receipt that arrives. Test both, including what a failed payment shows.
Ownership, maintenance and measurement
Establish before launch who owns the site, who updates it, what is measured, and how. A redesign nobody can maintain degrades within a year.