A Nonprofit Audit, Because Your Mission Includes Your Website

What We Keep Finding

The donation form is the page that pays for everything else, and it is almost always a third-party embed nobody has ever tried by ear. A donor who cannot finish the card fields does not write in to say so. The gift simply does not arrive and you learn nothing. The standard is stricter about that page than most people expect, because a donation flow is a complete process. Every page from the campaign page to the receipt has to conform before any one of them counts as conforming, so a failing embed does not fail the widget. It fails the whole ask.

Which leaves the obvious question. What do you do about a form you do not own? The standard answers it, and it gives you exactly two routes and no others. Either you monitor that embedded content and repair what breaks within two business days, or you publish a statement of partial conformance naming the parts you do not control clearly enough for a visitor to recognise them. What you cannot do is quietly carve the widget out and claim the rest of the page, because excluding part of a page from a claim is forbidden outright. Most of the nonprofits we talk to have been shown neither route.

There is a reason this lands harder here than a web bug would. The World Health Organization puts the number of people living with significant disability at 1.3 billion, which is roughly one in six of us. Your donors, your volunteers and the people your programs serve are all drawn from that same population, so a form that locks people out is a gap in the mission rather than a gap in the site. And if federal money reaches you, from whichever department sends it, you are a Section 504 recipient and the duties follow the funding. Section 508 does not follow the money and never has, whatever a grant portal's boilerplate implies, unless an award writes it into the terms.