ARTICLE
10 Guidelines for Nonprofit Website Credibility
Last Updated: Dec 6, 2024
Building a credible, trustworthy website should be a top priority for any nonprofit organization. When visitors don't trust your online presence, it undermines their faith in your organization and mission.
In 2004, researchers at Stanford University released highly influential guidelines for establishing web credibility. 20 years later, they are still nearly completely applicable. As they were based on a huge amount of research back then, and the way peoples’ brains work obviously hasn’t changed, that shouldn’t be surprising, but it still amazes me they hold up so well.
While the original Stanford guidelines are still influential, I think it’s valuable to add to them with an update that addresses best practices specifically for today’s nonprofit websites.
This edited framework provides context behind the original 10 essential principles, to help nonprofits think about projecting legitimacy, authority, and human connection from the moment someone interacts with your website. I used the exact initial wording of Stanford’s guidelines, but reordered the recommendations to be in approximate order of priority for a nonprofit site in today’s world.
Show that there's a real organization behind your site.
This is even more true in today's world of misinformation and AI. Make it very clear, on each page, what organization has created the site. Add information so that visitors can validate your organization’s credibility: a physical address, links to nonprofit rating organizations, membership organization that you belong to, perhaps a map to your physical office, if you have one.
Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
Your visitors will evaluate your site in seconds using visual design alone. Pay attention to visual hierarchy, consistency, white space, and more. A small nonprofit doesn’t need to have the same polish as a global one, and neither nonprofit should look as buttoned and formal as a bank website, but every organization’s site should be clean and pleasant.
Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
Don’t put ads for others on your site. Take care with putting any content in contrasting boxes in a right hand column on a desktop version — unless carefully designed, that information can look like an ad, leading visitors to ignore it and question credibility. Limit pop ups, and ensure a single visitor doesn’t see many of them in one site visit — although they are effective, they can annoy users. Write your calls-to-action in a friendly and sincere way, and try to avoid coming across as pushy or salesy.
Make your site easy to use — and useful.
Any site is more credible when it makes it easy to do things that visitors want to do. On the other hand, fancy features that are hard to use or that push to hard to make your visitors to do specific actions lose credibility points.
Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently).
Don’t let obviously old content linger on your site. Featuring an event that happened last month or a blog that hasn’t been updated in a year puts the rest of your content in doubt. Even as a small nonprofit, try to provide a new post or short feature every month or two.
Make it easy to contact you.
Organizations that block efforts to ask them questions can seem shady. If you’re eager for people to reach you, include a phone number and email address (properly shielded to reduce spam). If you’re less eager to get inquiries, you can limit that to an email form, but make it easy to find.
Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
Make it clear why your nonprofit has the expertise to do what you do. Provide credentials, relevant history of your organization, and the details about experts or authorities who are affiliated.
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
Show the people behind your organization, for instance with bios in an “About Us” or “Team” section. Provide credentials and their expertise. It can also be helpful to show a little humanity with information about hobbies or background. Showing quotes — with names — from clients or partners can also show that other people find your organization’s work useful.
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
If you can, link to third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present. Not that many people will follow those links, but providing the cross-references make people trust the information more.
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.
Broken links, typos, and oddly phrased error messages can have more impact on credibility than you might think.
If these basic principles haven't changed much in the last 20 years, they're not likely to change much in the future either. Showing credibility through your website will likely only become more critical. If your site addresses these core guidelines, you'll be positioned not only today, but to speak authentically to audiences well into the future.