Your website is the first thing a donor sees after they hear your name, and the first thing a program officer opens before a grant conversation. The grader scores five areas, weighted by how much each one affects giving.
The path from landing on your homepage to a completed gift. We look for a donate button that is visible without scrolling, whether giving happens on your own domain or bounces visitors to an unfamiliar third party, whether recurring giving is offered, and how many clicks and form fields stand between intent and a completed donation. Every extra step costs gifts.
What a first-time visitor uses to decide you are legitimate. That includes a valid security certificate, your EIN and contact details being easy to find, evidence of outcomes rather than only intentions, staff or board visibility, and a privacy policy. Donors and funders both look for these before committing.
Whether the site works. Page speed, mobile layout, broken elements, and technical health. A donation page that takes eight seconds on a phone loses people who fully intended to give.
Whether anyone can find you without already knowing your name. Page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, and whether search engines can read your pages. Small organizations frequently rank for nothing at all, which means every visitor has to arrive through an ad or a direct link.
What happens after someone visits and does not give. Email capture, analytics, and follow-up paths. Without these, traffic is spent once and never recovered.
A program officer reviewing your application will look you up. What they find shapes their read of your credibility before anyone reads your budget. That is the same reason we publish GrantDiscover, our free directory of private foundations built from IRS filings, so you can research funders as thoroughly as they research you.
Search foundations freeYes. You can run your site and see your score without paying. The full breakdown with specific fixes is unlocked with your email address.
About a minute. The grader loads your site the way a visitor would, then scores what it finds.
Anything above 80 puts you ahead of the field. Under 60 usually means something specific is broken rather than a long list of small issues, and those are the fastest wins.
Yes. Some teams grade a peer organization first to see how the scoring works before running their own.
Start with the donation experience findings, since those affect income directly. Trust signals are usually the next fastest to fix, because they are often a matter of adding information you already have.
Email capture, donor records, donation processing, and reporting are the pieces the grader scores under growth infrastructure. The Sponsor a Purpose CRM covers them, free for nonprofits, with no platform fees.
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