Generic conversion advice was written for products people buy for themselves. A donor gets nothing tangible back, so the math is different: they give because they believe a specific person or cause will be better off, and because they trust you to deliver it. That means your page has to do emotional and evidential work at the same time — make one outcome vivid, then prove the money reaches it. Feature-style bullet points and vague mission statements do neither, and the gift quietly doesn't happen.
Nonprofit pages also carry friction a normal checkout never sees: the recurring-versus-one-time decision, suggested-amount anchors that either lift or shrink the average gift, and hard objections about overhead and where funds actually go. A tool that only knows SaaS or e-commerce heuristics will praise a clean layout while missing that your ask is abstract, your amounts are anchored wrong, and your trust signals sit below the fold. We score against the patterns that actually move donations.