Fons Pitiús de Cooperació

A non-profit's website serves two audiences that want opposite things, and most sites are built for only one of them.

The first is the public: members, donors, volunteers, people who came across the organisation and are deciding whether to give it money or time. They respond to the work — who was helped, where, what changed.

The second is institutional: the councils, foundations and public bodies that award the grants which usually make up most of the budget. They are not moved by stories. They are checking that the organisation is administratively sound before they hand over public money, and they check before any conversation happens.

What that second audience looks for is a specific and unexciting list:

• Published accounts, for more than one year, so a trend is visible.
• Annual reports with what was done and what it cost.
• Governing body, statutes, registration number, legal form.
• Where the money came from and where it went, broken down by project.

The instinct is to treat these as compliance documents and put them behind a link labelled «transparency» in the footer. That is a mistake worth correcting, because for a non-profit those documents are the marketing. They are the evidence that the emotional case is backed by an organisation that can be trusted to spend the money properly, and both audiences need them — the individual donor is asking exactly the same question, just less formally.

There is a smaller point that matters more than it looks. Cooperation and aid organisations do work that is genuinely hard to see from the outside, often in another country and over years. A project page that ends when the funding ends tells nobody anything. What builds credibility is going back: what happened two years later, what worked, what did not. Almost nobody publishes that, and it is the most persuasive content such an organisation can produce.

Related: creating valuable content, trust as a ranking factor and web design in Ibiza.