A nonprofit site has to earn trust before it asks for money.
The legacy site carried useful mission content but had inconsistent presentation, template remnants, weak document hygiene, and a donation path that was not ready to support a credible public fundraising experience.
The design problem was larger than visual refresh: make the organization easier to understand, make governance and IRS records easy to verify, protect donor trust, and create a clean handoff to secure payment processing.
Design priorities
- Mission-first information architecture
- Clear About, Governance, Policies, Transparency, and Privacy paths
- Accurate labeling of IRS and financial records
- Accessible semantic structure and responsive behavior
- Direct Givebutter donation flow without storing card data on HostGator
The case study is inspectable in production.
This preview loads the actual public Foundation site. The site is the artifact: content hierarchy, trust signals, responsive front end, governance structure, transparency center, and donation path can all be reviewed directly.
From brochure site to public-service infrastructure.
Trust architecture
Separated mission, organizational story, governance, policies, transparency, privacy, and giving so donors and partners can find the evidence they need without hunting.
Document control
Reviewed IRS records before publication, distinguished the actual 501(c)(3) determination letter from an EIN notice, and separated 990-N filings from future Foundation financial statements.
Donation conversion
Moved payment handling to Givebutter while keeping the Foundation site responsible for mission context, credibility, giving information, and the donor decision.
Accessible front end
Introduced responsive layouts, semantic landmarks, readable contrast, skip navigation, clear action labels, and a consistent navigation model.
Operational recovery
Diagnosed a DNS mismatch that had taken the public site offline and then versioned the stylesheet to eliminate stale cross-browser CSS caching after deployment.
Real deployment
This was not a speculative redesign. The files were rebuilt, tested, deployed on the Foundation’s HostGator environment, and iterated against the live domain.