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Introducing Site Analysis: A Free Score for Your Fundraising Setup

Introducing Site Analysis: A Free Score for Your Fundraising Setup

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Most nonprofits know their donation page could do better. Far fewer know which thing to fix first. You can spend a weekend redesigning a campaign page and still miss the one setting that is quietly costing you recurring donors.

Charitable Lite 1.8.12 answers that question for you.

Site Analysis is a new, completely free report that scores your fundraising setup and hands you a prioritized list of what to fix, in order.

It only looks at your Charitable configuration. No campaign content or donor data, including names, emails, or donation amounts, is ever sent or stored.

No upgrade required, and no developer needed. 🥳

Why a Score Changes The Way You Fundraise

Just being told, “Hey, you need to improve your fundraiser” is not helpful.

Instead, getting a list of tasks like:

  • Add a goal to your active campaign
  • Offer another way to give
  • Shorten your donation form

Now those are actionable items that are actually helpful!

Site Analysis looks at how your site is actually configured, scores it across 4 areas, and turns the gaps into specific recommendations. Instead of guessing, you get a ranked to-do list, and a number that moves when you act on it.

See It in Action

Free Site Analysis dashboard showing Fundraising Score 51/100 (Good) and quick-win actions: Enable Offline Donations, Add a Payment Option, Enable Spam Protection, Set a Goal, and Donor Re-Engagement tips.

The 4 Areas Site Analysis Scores

Head to Reports » Site Analysis and run your first report. It takes about a minute.

A single overall score would tell you something is wrong without telling you what kind of wrong.

So instead of handing you one blended number, Charitable breaks your score into 4 separate areas, on purpose.

Here’s what each of the 4 actually means for you, in plain terms.

Activation tile: Getting live and bringing in your first donations (megaphone icon shown). Changes on a nonprofit dashboard screen. [informative]

Activation

Activation is the most basic layer and it’s the first checkpoint covering everything from your donation form to your payment gateway. It’s easy to assume that because your form loads and your gateway is connected, everything downstream is fine. That’s not always true. Maybe you connected a payment gateway a while back and never finished the setup.

Maybe a campaign went live without a goal amount, so donors never see any sense of momentum.

Maybe a required field on your form isn’t actually mapped to anything, so information you thought you were collecting has been going nowhere the whole time.

None of this shows up unless someone goes looking, which is exactly what Activation does for you. If this score comes back low, fix it first.

Health

Health shows you whether your existing setup is configured cleanly, without the misconfigurations that quietly turn donors away.

For instance, it could show you:

A currency mismatch between your gateway and a campaign that only shows up for donors in certain countries.

A “thank you” redirect that silently points to the wrong page after someone gives.

An old setting left behind from an earlier version of your form that nobody remembers turning on.

Any one of these might be costing you a small percentage of donors here and there, not enough to trigger a complaint, just enough to quietly add up over a year.

Health exists to go find that kind of thing before a donor has to be the one who sees it.

Growth

Activation and Health are both about problems. Growth is a little different, it’s about opportunity.

This score looks at whether your site is actually built to grow your donor base over time, not just process whatever gifts happen to come in today.

Is recurring giving turned on and visible, so a one-time donor has an easy path to becoming a monthly supporter?

Do donors have a way to opt into hearing from you again, or does the relationship end the moment the gift clears?

Is there anything in place that encourages a first-time donor to come back for a second gift?

If your Growth score is low, it doesn’t necessarily mean something’s broken.

It usually just means there’s an easy improvement available that you haven’t made yet.

Optimization

Optimization is the score for once everything else is already solid, the kind of fine-tuning that experienced fundraisers tend to obsess over, like form length, how many suggested donation amounts you’re showing, and which one is selected by default.

Small choices like these change how many donors finish giving, in ways that are well documented but genuinely hard to catch on your own site. You’ve looked at your own donation form so many times that you’ve stopped really seeing it.

Optimization looks at your form the way a first-time visitor sees it, not the way you see it after months of looking at it every day.

All 4 scores get checked every single time you run a report, and they’re deliberately independent of each other. You can have a beautifully optimized donation form sitting on top of a broken payment gateway, and you’d still be losing donations, just for a completely different reason than you’d expect.

Fundraising score displayed at the top of the Site Analysis report

Site Analysis is built to catch both kinds of problem, the obvious one and the quiet one, in the same pass.

Recommendations You Can Actually Act On

A score is useful, but a score by itself doesn’t fix anything, and if all you got was a number, you’d probably close the tab and forget about it by lunch. The list of recommendations underneath the score is really the point of the whole feature.

That list is ranked, not just dumped on you in whatever order Charitable happened to check things. Whatever matters most sits at the top. Each recommendation also shows the points it would add to your score, so you can see exactly which fix is worth doing first.

If you genuinely only have 10 minutes today, you don’t have to read the whole thing and figure out priority for yourself. You just work down from the top and stop whenever you run out of time, knowing you already handled the part that mattered most.

Quick Wins section in the Site Analysis report, showing prioritized recommendations

Every recommendation is written against your actual setup: your campaigns, your forms, your gateways, as they exist right now, not a generic best-practices checklist that half applies to you and half doesn’t. If a recommendation shows up on your report, it’s because Site Analysis found that specific thing on your specific site.

When you click a recommendation like “Enable Offline Donations,” it takes you straight to the Payment Settings page, where you can turn it on in a couple of clicks. No hunting through menus to find the right setting.

Enabling offline donations from the Payment Settings page

The best part? It ships in Charitable Lite, the free version of the plugin, so there’s nothing to unlock and nothing to buy first.

Get Started With Site Analysis

Site Analysis is available only in our Charitable Lite plugin (that’s the free version). It’s coming soon to the Pro plugin!

You can be looking at your own score in about a minute. Update to Charitable 1.8.12 from Plugins » Installed Plugins, then head to Reports » Site Analysis and run your first report.

Site Analysis report accessed from the Reports tab in Charitable

Don’t be surprised if your first score isn’t perfect. Most sites’ aren’t, and that’s really the point of running it. Work down the recommendations list starting at the top, and rerun the report any time you want to see the number move.

Read the Site Analysis Documentation →

Also Released: New Beacon Templates

With the release of Charitable Lite 1.8.12, we’ve also brought in 2 Beacon campaign templates that were previously only available in the Pro plugin.

Beacon leads with a full-width hero banner, your logo, your goal, and a donation widget locked right on top of the image, so visitors see the donation request the moment they arrive on your campaign page.

What’s New in Charitable

We also launched several powerful features and improvements recently:

🧾

Custom Receipts

Show a different thank-you page to every donor, based on their campaign, gift size, or country.

Learn More →

📝

Donation Form Block

Drop a fully working donation form directly into any page or post in the block editor.

Learn More →

👤

Creator Profiles

Give every peer-to-peer fundraiser a permanent, shareable page with their bio, avatar, and campaigns.

Learn More →

📱

Apple Pay and Google Pay in Mollie

Let mobile donors check out with a face scan or fingerprint instead of typing out a card number.

Learn More →

📋

Ambassadors 3.0

Moderate and manage your whole peer-to-peer network from new directory and reporting screens.

Learn More →

⚡

Razorpay Integration

Accept UPI, cards, and more from India-based donors with a native, no-code connection.

Learn More →

We’ve been adding to Charitable constantly, features and improvements designed to help you raise more and serve your donors better. See everything we’ve shipped at the Charitable Changelog.

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Powerful Fundraising Resources

🤖 Use Charitable with Your AI Assistant

See Charitable + AI →

⬇️ Download proven strategies, campaign ideas, and expert tools
Get the Fundraising Kit →  

💸 Get Free Fundraising Resources
Head to the Charitable Fundraising Hub →

🤔 Got questions about Charitable?
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author avatar
Melinda Bartley
I’m the senior writer at Charitable, with over 15 years of experience in content creation, digital marketing, and SEO. Beyond my professional role, I’m the co-founder and trustee of a non-profit organization committed to animal rescue and welfare. Throughout my career, I’ve helped build 17+ blogs – many from the ground up, transforming them into successful marketing platforms that drive traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate revenue.

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Donations Improvement

📊 Your Pro Dashboard Can Now Compare, Export, and Score!

Most fundraising dashboards only tell you how much you have raised. Charitable Pro 1.8.19 rebuilds the dashboard and the Reports Overview around the harder questions: whether anything is broken, whether this period beat the last one, and which single change would make the most difference today. Why this is important:

  • 📈 Every figure has a trend: Pick a period and the tiles and the chart move together, with each total shown against the previous period.
  • 🗓️ Charts that stay readable: Short ranges group donations day by day, while longer ranges group by week or month, so a full year reads as a curve instead of a flat line.
  • 🔀 Compare any 2 periods: Not just consecutive ones, so you can ask how this December did against last December. That matters because fundraising is seasonal.
  • 📤 Export the whole summary: Send the full overview out as CSV or PDF, ready for a board pack or a funder report.
  • 🎯 Score your setup for free: Have your fundraising setup scored, so the one change worth making next is the one you can see.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Melinda Bartley
I'm the senior writer at Charitable, with over 15 years of experience in content creation, digital marketing, and SEO. Beyond my professional role, I'm the co-founder and trustee of a non-profit organization committed to animal rescue and welfare. Throughout my career, I've helped build 17+ blogs - many from the ground up, transforming them into successful marketing platforms that drive traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate revenue.
Feature New

🎟️ Introducing Charitable Events: Sell Tickets Inside Your Campaigns!

Most nonprofits sell event tickets in one tool and collect donations in another, which leaves two sets of reports and a manual match at the end of the year. Charitable Events brings both together, selling tickets through the same donation forms and payment gateways you already run in Charitable. Why this is important:

  • 🎟️ Every ticket is a donation: Ticket sales run through the gateway you already use and count toward the campaign goal, with everything managed under Charitable » Events.
  • 📱 QR check-in from any phone: Each attendee gets their own QR code on the receipt, and volunteers scan at the door through a check-in link that needs no WordPress account.
  • 🧾 Receipts ready for tax time: Give each ticket type a fair market value, and Charitable puts the correct tax-deductible amount on every donor receipt.
  • 📋 Attendee details at checkout: Ask every guest for a meal choice, shirt size, or access needs, with a separate attendee record created for each ticket.
  • 🗓️ Blocks and calendars included: Three editor blocks plus Sugar Calendar and The Events Calendar support put your events where supporters already look.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Melinda Bartley
I'm the senior writer at Charitable, with over 15 years of experience in content creation, digital marketing, and SEO. Beyond my professional role, I'm the co-founder and trustee of a non-profit organization committed to animal rescue and welfare. Throughout my career, I've helped build 17+ blogs - many from the ground up, transforming them into successful marketing platforms that drive traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate revenue.
ai New

🚀 Unleash AI Power in Charitable!

Your AI assistant can now build, edit, and manage your Charitable fundraising campaigns directly — just by asking. With Charitable Pro adding write support for the WordPress Abilities API, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor can handle full administrative actions safely through MCP. Why this is important:

  • 🤖 Campaign creation in plain language: Prompt your assistant with a goal like “Set up a fundraiser for the shelter with a $5,000 goal”, and it builds a real draft campaign complete with suggested donation tiers.
  • 🎨 Instant donation form tweaks: Add custom fields, change button colors, or reorder elements without diving into form settings.
  • 📝 Offline gift logging: Tell your assistant about cash or check gifts, and it will match donor emails and record transactions into your history.
  • 🛡️ Safety and control by default: Write access stays strictly off until turned on in Charitable » Tools » AI MCP, keeping read-only reporting safe by default.
  • 📜 Full audit logging: Every change made by an AI assistant is tracked under Charitable » Tools » Logs, so you always know who (or what) updated your site.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Melinda Bartley
I'm the senior writer at Charitable, with over 15 years of experience in content creation, digital marketing, and SEO. Beyond my professional role, I'm the co-founder and trustee of a non-profit organization committed to animal rescue and welfare. Throughout my career, I've helped build 17+ blogs - many from the ground up, transforming them into successful marketing platforms that drive traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate revenue.
Improvement Payments

💰 Accept Recurring Donations with Windcave and Charitable

A donor sets their gift up once on Windcave’s secure payment page, and Charitable bills every renewal after that on schedule. Why this is important:

🏦 Organizations banked in New Zealand or Australia: monthly giving on the gateway your bank already set you up with, with no second processor to onboard.
⛪ Churches taking regular tithes and offerings: congregants set their own schedule once, which is the simplest way to launch recurring church giving without a separate platform.
🌏 Groups with donors in several currencies: Windcave handles more than 20, so a supporter can give in the currency they actually hold.
📅 Operating funds rather than one-time campaigns: switch on Recurring Only mode and the one-off option disappears, so every gift to that campaign is a subscription.
🧾 Teams with no developer on staff: 3 sets of credentials pasted into a settings page, and no code anywhere.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Melinda Bartley
I'm the senior writer at Charitable, with over 15 years of experience in content creation, digital marketing, and SEO. Beyond my professional role, I'm the co-founder and trustee of a non-profit organization committed to animal rescue and welfare. Throughout my career, I've helped build 17+ blogs - many from the ground up, transforming them into successful marketing platforms that drive traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate revenue.
automation update

⚡ Visual Automation Builder: Drag and Drop With No Code!

Charitable Automation Connect 2.3.0 introduces the Visual Automation Builder, a full-screen canvas that lays each automation out as a flow of connected cards: a trigger, optional conditions, and a list of actions that run in order.

🧩 Many actions, one trigger: Tag a donor, send an email, add a note, and fire a webhook from a single event, dragged into any order.

✉️ Act inside Charitable: New Send Email, Tag Donor, and Add Donor Note actions run with no external service required.

🔤 Merge tags: Personalize emails and notes with live fields like {first_name}, {total}, and {campaign_name}.

🔁 Apply to existing donors: Run Tag Donor and Add Donor Note against the donors you already have.

🖥️ Canvas or Simple: Switch views anytime, and automations built before 2.3.0 keep working unchanged.

Read more here.

author avatar
Melinda Bartley
I'm the senior writer at Charitable, with over 15 years of experience in content creation, digital marketing, and SEO. Beyond my professional role, I'm the co-founder and trustee of a non-profit organization committed to animal rescue and welfare. Throughout my career, I've helped build 17+ blogs - many from the ground up, transforming them into successful marketing platforms that drive traffic, boost brand visibility, and generate revenue.