How to prepare your website for a donor audit

When you finally win a grant, deliver the project and launch the website, it feels like the hardest part is behind you. But then comes the moment of truth — the technical and financial audit from the donors. That's when meticulous experts open your digital product not as ordinary users, but as inspectors with a magnifying glass.

On my first projects I collected so many bruises from rookie website mistakes that preparing for an audit is now a separate checklist for me. If you don't want the foundation demanding its money back at the final stage over non-compliance, here is my own experience of what to polish on the site before the review arrives.

1. Branding and logos: paranoia #1

The first thing any auditor looks at is whether their funding is displayed correctly. Every foundation (whether the UCF, USAID or the EU programmes) has a clear brandbook and communication rules.

My blunder: on one of the first projects we placed the donor's logo but forgot the mandatory disclaimer (the text stating that the authors' views do not necessarily reflect the position of the foundation). Our report was almost sent back.

What to check right now: make sure the site footer or the homepage carries all the approved logos — in the correct proportions, colours and with the exact acknowledgement text and disclaimer. This is the first checkpoint.

2. Promised functionality vs reality

In a grant application we all tend to embellish the future product a little, promising cosmic technologies. But the auditor will open your technical specification from the grant agreement and click through every single item.

From my own experience: if you wrote that the site would have an interactive map with 50 locations, filtering and search, but in reality you built just a static picture with pins, you're in big trouble.

What to do: test all the feedback forms, search bars, calculators and user accounts. Everything paid for out of the budget must work without 404 errors. If a feature could not be implemented technically, it had to be formally agreed with your programme officer during development, not shown as a half-baked product during the audit.

3. Accessibility and inclusivity (this is now critical)

European and American foundations are now simply obsessed (in a good way) with the digital accessibility of content for people with disabilities — the WCAG standards.

What to check: is your site adapted for mobile devices? Is there a version for people with visual impairments (adjustable font size, a high-contrast theme)? Are alt tags set for all the important images so screen readers can voice them? If the audit is international, the absence of basic inclusivity can become a serious minus.

4. Licences for graphics, fonts and code

If a designer downloaded a nice font from some free Telegram channel, and a developer used a paid plugin without a licence, you expose the whole organisation to lawsuits — and donors understand this perfectly well.

How I handle this now: for all fonts, icons, images and code libraries we keep a separate folder of licences (for example, MIT for code, Creative Commons, or proof of purchase for stock photos). An auditor may ask you to prove that the site's intellectual property is clean.

5. Texts, language versions and content

A website cannot greet an auditor with empty pages full of Lorem Ipsum or placeholder pictures.

An important nuance: if the grant specified a bilingual version (for example, Ukrainian plus English), everything must be translated — including system messages such as 'Form submission error' and the button labels. Half-built pages look like an imitation of work.

6. Metrics and statistics (proof the site is alive)

Donors want to see that they invested in a tool of impact, not in a digital desert. They will certainly ask for traffic statistics for the reporting period.

What to set up in advance: make sure that from the very first day of launch the site has Google Analytics (or another agreed metric) correctly configured and collecting data. Prepare a clear, understandable report: how many people came, which pages are the most popular, and which regions they came from.

My main takeaway

A website audit is not an exam you can win on charisma. It is a dry check of how well your site matches the text of the grant agreement. Run an internal audit a week before the official one: walk through the site with the eyes of a nit-picking inspector, fix the small bugs, prepare screenshots and licences. Then the final report will go through easily, and your organisation will earn a reputation as a reliable partner worth giving the next — and bigger — grants.