Charities are under pressure – here’s how your charity can raise more funds through its website (in 2025 and beyond)

Online Giving Accounts for over 10% of Charity Fundraising

According to research referenced by Give.org in the US, over 10% of giving to charities is made via online platforms, and this figure is sure to be growing. Offline channels might still make up the biggest chunk of donations, but web based activity is continuously growing.

How does this figure compare for your organisation – is it something you are actively monitoring and tracking? And how has this breakdown changed over time? Most likely you will see that the chunk of online revenue continues to grow. But if it’s not – it could identify that your website isn’t being utilised fully.

Which Web Platforms are best when it comes to raising funds for charities?

There’s no particular platform which is better than another – it depends really on how it’s been configured. WordPress is a popular web platform and powers approximately 40% of all sites on the web. Squarespace is another common choice although can be quite limiting in terms of functionality, but good for charities that are keen to self-manage things. Even a platform like Shopify could work, especially if your charity has an online storefront. 

The question here isn’t really about the choice of web platform, but how you’ve built out your website and the kind of functionality needed to maximise donations and revenue.

Best Features to Raise Funds on a Charity Website

If you use a platform like WordPress it’s easy enough to add new functionality to a website from the use of custom plugins. Here are some must-have features and functionality if you want to grow your charities online revenue.

1 – An Online Storefront to Diversify Your Income

This one won’t be suitable for all charities, but for many of them it could be a great alternative way of raising funds. Having worked with Woodland Heritage in the UK, they added an online shop using Squarespace where they now sell organic cotton clothing, prints and greeting cards. 

For charities that might struggle to make a very emotive connection with their target audience, and thus might find it hard to encourage one-off or regular donations, selling branded charity merchandise in a way that aligns with the charity can be a good additional revenue stream.

Squarespace has a shop functionality inbuilt, whilst Shopify is built with ecommerce in mind. WordPress can power store functionality too, via custom plugins for popular storefront software like WooCommerce, OpenCart and Ecwid.

2 – A Highly Visible Donate Button

This might be an obvious one but there will be many charity websites where there’s not a very clear, prominent button for visitors to make a donation. This should be the number 1 consideration when building a charity’s website – enabling users to quickly and easily make a donation with as minimal friction as possible.

Many sites have a stickied Donate button in a fixed position within the navigation menu, often to the right of the page. Web tracking should be implemented and configured so that progress can be monitored, especially for forms with multiple stages, to find out if/when users might “drop off” during the donation process. This can be configured using web tracking software like GA4 or the most privacy-friendly Plausible Analytics.

3 – Push your Newsletter in Prominent Areas of the Site

Don’t forget that when someone comes to your website, they are most likely to be a very fleeting visitor and won’t hang around for long (perhaps 2 – 3 minutes at a push!) so it makes sense to try and capture their email address so you can contact them in the future and nurture your relationship.

To do this you need to push your newsletter from prominent areas on the website, and to be sure of adding them to any email campaigns and internal databases if they complete a specific action on the website, for example if they make a donation.

Make sure that you have an up to date cookie and privacy policy if you are collecting email addresses, to ensure you are compliant with any regulations (GDPR for example in the UK).

Written by Matt Tutt