Answer a few honest questions across nine areas — strategy, audiences, content, brand, technology, SEO, accessibility, operations, and budget — to see whether your organization is actually ready to start a redesign, and exactly what to fix first if it isn't.
Start the assessment ↓Whether the organization agrees on why this project exists.
Whether you know who the site actually needs to serve.
Whether the words and pages are ready to be planned around.
Whether your visual identity and messaging are ready to hand off.
Whether you understand your current stack well enough to plan around it.
Whether you can protect the organic traffic you already have.
Whether accessibility is planned for, not left as an afterthought.
Whether the project has the internal support it needs to actually finish.
Whether money and deadlines are grounded in reality.
50%
Discovery recommended first
Several open questions remain across more than one category. A structured discovery phase — internal or with a vendor — will resolve these faster than starting design work now.
By category
Recommendations only show up here for categories where your answers indicate real gaps — ordered from the biggest gap to the smallest.
01
Before you talk to a vendor, get leadership and key stakeholders in a room to agree on 2–3 specific goals this website needs to achieve — and who has final say when priorities conflict. A redesign without agreed goals tends to drift in scope and timeline.
Nonprofit digital strategy →02
Spend time before kickoff naming your 2–3 primary audiences and the one or two things each group needs to accomplish on the site. Vendors can't design donor or applicant journeys you haven't defined yourselves.
Nonprofit web design →03
Start a simple content inventory now — every current URL, whether it stays, merges, or retires, and who owns rewriting it. Content is consistently the most underestimated part of a website timeline.
Website RFP template →04
If logo files, brand guidelines, or messaging clarity are missing, that's not a blocker — but flag it early so the project timeline (and budget) accounts for a light brand pass alongside the website work.
Creative & branding →05
Get admin or export access to your current CMS confirmed, and list every third-party tool (CRM, donation platform, email, analytics) connected to the site. Vendors can't scope integrations they don't know exist.
Platforms we implement →06
Confirm you (or your vendor) have access to Google Analytics and Search Console before kickoff, and pull a list of your top organic-traffic pages. Without this, a redesign risks losing search rankings nobody notices until it's too late.
Nonprofit SEO services →07
Decide which accessibility standard you're targeting (WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 AA is the common nonprofit baseline) and name who owns it through QA and after launch — even if that owner is your vendor.
Website accessibility →08
Name one internal project lead who owns day-to-day decisions, and get a realistic read on stakeholder availability for reviews. Projects without a clear internal owner are the ones most likely to stall mid-build.
Institutional Website Risk Review →09
Use a cost calculator to get a directional budget range before you talk to vendors, and write down any hard deadlines (fiscal year, event, grant deliverable) so proposals can be realistic about timeline.
Website cost calculator →Whatever your score, we'll help you turn the gaps above into a clear, prioritized plan before you commit to a budget or timeline.
A nonprofit website redesign is rarely derailed by design taste. It's derailed by unclear goals, content that isn't ready, integrations nobody mapped, or an approval process that takes twice as long as planned. This assessment surfaces those risks while they're still cheap to fix.
The most common cause of a blown timeline isn't the vendor — it's a project that started before stakeholders agreed on what "done" looks like.
Design and development can move fast. Copywriting, review cycles, and content migration are usually the real bottleneck, and they're the easiest thing to underestimate before you start.
Every gap this assessment surfaces is far less expensive to close in week one than to discover in week twelve, mid-build.
How it works
Turn your scope into a realistic budget range.
Explore →Requirements builderTurn scattered knowledge into a real requirements document.
Explore →RFP GeneratorReady to formalize the project? Build a procurement-ready RFP.
Explore →Redesign guideChecklist, timeline, and SEO-safe migration planning.
Explore →Website auditNot sure what's actually broken? Start with an audit.
Explore →Digital strategyFor gaps bigger than one project can fix alone.
Explore →Nonprofit web designWhen you're ready, see how CauseHouse approaches the build.
Explore →