Modernizing a Legacy Website with Trusted UX

Challenge

The donate section had grown by accretion. Two separate giving forms had drifted apart until they actively contradicted each other — different amounts, different premium defaults, different payment options, different address fields. The pages meant to explain why to give were buried behind a dropdown. A hero video had broken to “Sorry, this video isn’t available.” A trust badge image was failing to load on the page donors use to verify stewardship.

None of that is exotic. It is what a decade of small, well-intentioned edits does to a site. The constraint was that the audience skews older, high-asset, and deeply committed — the kind of donor who notices when something feels different and reads that as a reason to hesitate. Modernizing the interface could not read as a stranger asking for money.

Research inputs

Every recommendation in the wireframes cites its source, so the team could always trace a decision back to evidence rather than taste:

• UX audit — page inventory, form audit, and login-flow findings across the live donate section.
• Three stakeholder questionnaires — one on the main giving pages, one on legacy and ways-to-give, one on Our Vision, each with a named owner.
• Phase 2 kickoff thread — scope, sequencing, and the email journeys tied to each page.
• Online-giving best practice — benchmarked against comparable nonprofits for trust and checkout patterns.

The governing decision

Five pages persuade. Exactly one form transacts.

Splitting persuasion from transaction is the decision the rest of the work hangs off. The five education pages — Monthly Giving, Ways to Give, Legacy Gifts, Financial Integrity, Our Vision — make the case. A single form takes the gift, with one-time and monthly as two states of the same form rather than two competing pages.

Every call to action deep-links into that form with gift type and amount pre-selected, so an advertised tier and the form’s buttons can never drift apart again. It is a structural fix, not a copy fix: the class of bug that produced the original contradiction is designed out.

Designing for trust

“Trusted UX” was the brief, so trust got treated as a component rather than a tone:

• A persistent trust rail beside the form — gift summary, ECFA and accreditation badges, security copy, and a phone number — because donors expect to see security handled, not assumed.
• Brand continuity across the hand-off. The form header mirrors the main site so the move from the marketing domain to the giving domain is invisible; the audit flagged that jump as a friction point.
• A submit button that echoes the gift — “Give $50 monthly” — so the amount and frequency are confirmed at the moment of commitment.
• A named human, not a form, on the legacy pages. For gifts of that size the real conversion event is often a phone call, so the gift-planning representative appears as a peer card with photo and direct line.
• No video on the form. Stakeholders reported embedded video caused friction and did not motivate completion. Persuasion moved upstream to the education pages, where it is safe.

Fixing the funnel leak

The audit’s single biggest leak: a donor part-way through billing who clicked “Already have an account?” was dropped into the full marketing site with no path back to their gift. The gift was simply gone.

The rebuilt login keeps the stripped checkout header so the donor never visually leaves the giving flow, carries a gift-state banner (“Your $150 gift is saved”) with a return path, and preserves form state through authentication. Guest continuation stays available throughout — login is a convenience, never a gate.

Page-level decisions

Donate Now

Two-column layout — form plus persistent trust rail — replacing a long single column, with a target of completing a gift in under two minutes. All three payment methods appear in both states; PayPal had been missing from monthly entirely.

Monthly Giving — “Advocates for Truth”

Becomes a pure education page. Its duplicate embedded form is removed and tier cards deep-link into the form’s monthly state with the chosen tier pre-selected. Monthly buttons now mirror the advertised tiers instead of inheriting the one-time set.

Smarter Ways to Give

Cards replace accordions so all five giving methods — appreciated assets, IRA qualified distributions, wills and trusts, donor-advised funds, and planning support — are scannable without interaction. The audience is potentially less digitally fluent but highly financially literate; hiding options behind clicks costs more than the vertical space saves.

Financial Integrity

Stats before documents — program spend, years accredited, countries reached — because major donors want stewardship information fast and most will never open a 990. The year-tab archive stays, with every PDF labeled by type and file size.

Our Vision

Previously buried in a microsite with outdated content. Rebuilt around the refreshed ten-year vision with the three initiative pillars as visible cards, and reserved structural space for the differentiation claim, since reducing confusion about the ministry’s identity is a stated multi-year goal.

Accessibility and hygiene

A modernization is also a chance to clear debt that quietly costs conversions:

• Native required plus aria-required, correct email input types, and full autocomplete coverage — including removing autocomplete="off" from the address field.
• Descriptive link text everywhere — action plus method, “Give from your IRA” — replacing “Click Here,” which helps accessibility, SEO, and scent of information at once.
• A mobile reCAPTCHA fix: the floating badge overlapped body copy at 390px, so the inline text disclosure replaced it.
• Visible section navigation replacing the dropdown across all five education pages, with the current page highlighted and a persistent donate button.
• Typo fixes in the legacy testimonial — credibility copy cannot carry spelling errors, least of all for this audience.

Status & what’s next

Delivered as v5 wireframes with per-page annotations and a draft copy deck, sourced from the live pages and restructured into the new layouts. The work is pre-launch, and a few things are deliberately still open rather than quietly decided:

• Book-premium default and the monthly tier set — both stakeholder calls that must resolve to one answer across gift types.
• Whether hidden organizational fields in the current form markup are dead code or an unsurfaced organizational-giving flow.
• Whether legacy campaign URLs redirect into the unified form or stay distinct.

Patterns the team has never tested — the one-time/monthly toggle and the payment tabs — are flagged for A/B validation before launch rather than assumed. Email journeys, EFT error states, the confirmation and receipt experience, and site-wide search are tracked as carried-forward items so they stay on the agenda instead of disappearing.

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