Context
WeCare Foundation does early-childhood work in two of Tanzania's regions — Mbeya in the southern highlands and Mara up by Lake Victoria. The work is real and local: programmes for children in communities that government services reach last. What they did not have was the public apparatus a charity needs to be trusted by people who cannot visit in person.
For an NGO, the website is not marketing. It is infrastructure. It is the thing a potential donor in Dar es Salaam, or a diaspora Tanzanian in London, or an institutional grant officer looks at before deciding whether this organisation is real, competent, and honest with money. A weak site does not just look bad — it actively costs donations, because giving money to strangers requires evidence, and the site is where the evidence lives.
The brief was therefore about credibility and transparency far more than aesthetics. Make it easy to give, and make it obvious where the money goes.
People don't give to a cause. They give to a cause they trust. The website's job is to earn the trust, then get out of the way of the donation.
Decisions
01
Decision
Make donating the shortest path on the site.
Every page assumes the visitor might give in the next thirty seconds. The donation flow is short, works on a mid-range phone, and accepts card payments so that international and diaspora donors — often the largest givers — are not blocked by local payment friction. The fewer steps between intention and confirmation, the more intentions become donations.
02
Decision
Treat transparency as a feature, not a PDF.
Trust in a charity is built by showing the work and the numbers, not asserting them. Programmes are documented with what they do, where, and for whom; reporting is presented as part of the site rather than buried in an annual report nobody downloads. Transparency that you can see in ten seconds is worth more than transparency you have to request.
03
Decision
Build for the regions, not just the capital.
WeCare's work is in Mbeya and Mara, and so are many of the people who need to see it. The site is built to load on slow connections and modest devices, because a transparency page that only renders well on fast urban broadband is not transparent to the communities the charity actually serves.
04
Decision
Keep it maintainable by a small team.
NGOs do not have engineering departments. The site is built so that updating a programme, posting an update, or adjusting a campaign does not require a developer on call. The technology should never be the reason the charity's public face goes stale.
Outcome
WeCare now has the public infrastructure its work deserves — a place to send a donor, a grant officer, or a partner with confidence that what they find will build trust rather than erode it. The donation path is open, the programmes are visible, and the reporting is part of the site rather than an afterthought.
2
Regions served — Mbeya & Mara
Card
Donations, including international
Live
At wecare.or.tz
Add the charity's real figures here — funds raised, donors, children reached — once WeCare confirms numbers it is comfortable publishing.
- Next.js
- Stripe
- Vercel
What I’d do differently
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I would have built recurring giving in from the start. One-off donations are easier to ship but worse for a charity's stability. Monthly recurring donations — even small ones — are what let an NGO plan, and that should have been a launch feature, not a later addition.
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The impact reporting needs a cadence the team can keep. As with any content-driven trust mechanism, transparency only works if it stays current. A reporting rhythm the small team can realistically sustain should have been negotiated as part of the engagement, not left as good intentions.
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I should have added local payment options alongside card. Card payments serve international donors well, but many willing local givers reach for mobile money first. Supporting both from day one would have widened the donor base meaningfully.