Nonprofit Donation Forms: What 105 Small Charities Actually Use

connectNPO · Updated October 2026

A donor does not arrive at a form. A donor arrives at your home page, presses Donate, and finds out where it leads. Guides to the nonprofit donation form start after that point: how many fields, which button colour, where the monthly box goes.

So we pressed the button. On October 1 and 2, 2026 we followed the Donate link on 105 small California nonprofit websites to wherever it went, read the form that was there, and checked every result by hand against a screenshot. Six of the links were dead.

What happens when a donor presses Donate?

In this count of 105 small California nonprofits with a Donate link, 85 (81.0%) led to a working online form: 42 on the organization’s own site and 43 on another site. 14 (13.3%) did not reach a form we could see, including six dead links.

Think of a shop. The checkout inside works. The trouble, when there is any, is the sign over the door: on 6 of the 105 sites, about one in seventeen, the Donate link pointed at nothing.

Half the forms live on someone else’s site

Sending a donor to another site to give is like sending a guest to a gift table in the building next door: it works, as long as the guest can still tell it is your party.

105 organizations whose home page carried a donate link, followed on October 1 and 2, 2026. Shares are of the 105.

The split is close to even. 42 organizations kept the donor on their own website, with the form either part of the page or a giving tool’s form embedded in it. 43 sent the donor to a different website to give. Both are common, and we did not measure which raises more. They look different: on the organization’s own site, the form sits next to its name and story; on another site, the donor lands on a page designed by the giving tool, with the organization’s name added to it.

The bigger difference was the number of clicks. Of the 91 links that were not broken, 58 reached the giving page in one click from the home page and 33 took two. Forms on the organization’s own site were one click away for 35 of 42. Forms on another site took two for 25 of 43, because the first page explained the gift and a second button opened the form.

The tools behind the button

Behind the 85 working links we found 40 different named giving tools. PayPal came first with 18 (22 if we add four PayPal pages that refused our browser). Next was Givebutter with 5, then Donorbox and GiveWP with 4 each. Three tools had three each: Squarespace’s built-in donation block, Zeffy, and a WordPress form plugin using Stripe. The rest appeared once or twice. The two most common payment companies have guides of their own: PayPal for nonprofits and Stripe for nonprofits, and Venmo and Square have one too: Venmo for nonprofits and Square for nonprofits.

So in this count there is no standard tool, and no reason to change tools because of this list. The counts are here for scale, not as a ranking, and we did not compare fees, which change by plan. The next section shows how the tool affects what the form offers. If you are choosing what your site runs on as well, our count of what these same websites are built on is the companion to this one.

What a nonprofit donation form offers

The 72 forms we could read as they loaded. Each share has its own count: on one form the fields did not load in our browser, and five forms could not be checked at phone width (390 pixels), most because the form sat closed in a pop-up.

These are the forms we could actually read as they loaded: 72 of the 85 working links. The other 13 led to a giving page, but the form itself sat one step further, behind a list of funds or a button that opens a payment window. We stopped there rather than start a payment, or the next step would not open in our browser.

Four forms in five offered a monthly choice (58 of 71), and that matters: in M+R Benchmarks 2026, monthly gifts made up 22% of online revenue in 2025 for nonprofits with under $1 million a year in online revenue. Suggested amounts were less even. Forms on the organization’s own site showed them 32 times out of 41; forms on another site, 17 out of 31. Half of the 14 forms on another site without suggested amounts were PayPal donate pages, which asked the donor to type an amount. Three of the four forms that did not fit a phone had no layout for small screens; the fourth ran 12 pixels too wide.

The button that goes nowhere

A dead Donate link is a doorbell wired to nothing: it looks fine from the street, and no one inside hears it.

Six links in the count, 5.7%, were dead: an expired payment link; an old giving page that now sends donors to a software company; a sponsorship registration that closed in 2023; a page from the website theme’s demo, left in the menu; the home page of a giving tool instead of the organization’s own form; and a Donate button that did nothing when pressed.

None of these is hard to fix, and all six still returned a normal page to our browser, three of them another company’s page, so a check that only asks whether a link loads would have passed every one. A dead Donate link can look like a quiet month. The surest way to find one is to press the button the way a donor does.

Seven more links led to a PayPal or Give Lively donate page that answered our automated browser with a security check, a rate limit or no answer on every try over two days. They may well work for a person, but we could not confirm it, so the table counts them under broken. If they all work, 92 of 105 (87.6%) had a way to give online. One site failed to load at all because of a certificate error, which a donor would see as a browser warning.

How we counted

The organizations are the ones in our count of what small nonprofit websites are built on: California 501(c)(3) public charities with revenue between $250,000 and $1 million, drawn at random from the IRS business master file. Of the 152 whose home page loaded, 105 carried a donate or give link, and those 105 are this count. The same sample also sits behind our count of out-of-date nonprofit websites.

For each site a program picked the Donate link in the header or menu (or, failing that, the first one on the page) and opened it from Los Angeles on October 1 and 2, 2026 in an automated browser, once in a desktop-sized window and once in a phone-sized one. Where the first page was a step before the form, one more click was made: by the program on 25 sites and by hand on 12 where the program could not press the right button (an image with no text, a link that opens a pop-up, a row of amount tiles), some of them on links that turned out to be broken. It recorded where the form was, which tool served it, and what the form showed, and took a screenshot of each.

Then every one of the 105 rows was checked by hand against its screenshots, and 79 were corrected, mostly the name of the giving tool and what could be read behind a PayPal button. The automatic reading had also missed suggested amounts on some forms and twice mistook an employer-matching search box for a form. The published figures are the hand-checked ones. Nothing was typed into any form and no payment was started. What this count cannot tell you: we visited each site once, a program chose the link, we followed at most one extra click, and these are California nonprofits, not a national estimate. No organization is named.

Five checks for your own donation form

The count suggests where to look first. None of this needs a new tool:

1. 01Press it on a phone. Once a month, open your home page on a phone, press Donate, and follow it to the form. All six dead links in this count would have shown up the first time someone did.
2. 02Count the clicks. Count the clicks from your home page to an amount box. One is enough when the Donate page is the form. In this count, forms on another site took two for 25 of 43.
3. 03Look at the first screen of the form. Is there a monthly choice, and are there suggested amounts? If your tool asks donors to type an amount, check whether it can show three or four instead.
4. 04Read it as a stranger. Is it clear the money goes to you? If your form is on another site, the page looks like the giving tool’s, not yours, so make sure your name and one line about what the gift does are easy to see.
5. 05Say how else to give. At least 21 of the 91 giving pages that loaded in this count told donors how to give by check. If you take checks, put the address on the same page.

If you want to see what a finished give panel can say beside the amounts, our eight donation page examples can be pressed one by one, and year-end giving covers what to change before December. For everything a home page should lead to besides the form, see what should be on a nonprofit website.

Comparing donation platforms such as Zeffy or Givebutter? Our Zeffy vs Givebutter comparison shows what donors saw added before they paid, on real nonprofit giving pages. For every option on one page, see our guide to nonprofit payment processing.

Frequently asked questions

Counted on October 1 and 2, 2026 from Los Angeles: 105 California 501(c)(3) public charities with revenue between $250,000 and $1 million and a donate link on the home page, one visit each, every row checked by hand. Figures are aggregates; no organization is named. This guide is general information, not legal or tax advice.