The Challenge
International Social Service USA is a nonprofit connecting cross-border families through casework services covering child welfare, custody, migration, and family reunification. ISS-USA's agency partner, K Global, a Washington, D.C., communications and public affairs firm, brought FatLab in as the white-label development team to build a website that could serve two purposes: tell their story to supporters and potential donors, and provide a trustworthy platform for online donations. The organization needed recurring donation support so donors could give monthly or annually on autopilot, an option for donors to cover processing fees so more money reaches the mission, accessibility for their diverse international audience, and a flexible content system their team could manage without developer involvement.
Our Solution
FatLab built the site as a white-label project for K Global, delivering a custom platform that combines organizational storytelling with a complete online giving system. Donors can give one-time or set up recurring gifts on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, with the option to cover processing fees so the full donation reaches ISS-USA. The platform accepts credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and bank transfers.
Five web forms handle non-donation interactions and automatically sync subscribers into the email marketing system. 19 flexible page layouts give the team full control over creating and updating content. A custom search optimization tool ensures ISS-USA's services and mission are properly surfaced in both traditional and AI-powered search results. After launch, FatLab transitioned into the direct hosting, maintenance, security, and performance management role for the site.
What We Built
- A complete online donation platform with recurring gifts, fee recovery, and multiple payment methods
- 400+ donations processed through the platform
- 19 flexible page layouts for building and updating content without developer involvement
- Email marketing integration automatically syncing website contacts into subscriber lists
- Search optimization tool ensuring visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search
- Accessibility compliance covering WCAG 2.2, ADA, and Section 508 standards
Project Overview
International Social Service - U.S.A. (ISS-USA) is a nonprofit organization that connects cross-border families through intercountry casework services. Their work spans child welfare, international custody disputes, migration assistance, and family reunification, helping families navigate the complex legal and social systems that separate them across national borders. It is specialized, deeply human work that depends on public trust and donor support.
The project originated as a white-label engagement through K Global, a Washington, D.C. communications and public affairs firm that manages ISS-USA's brand and marketing strategy. K Global brought FatLab in as the development team to build the site, handling the full technical scope while K Global managed the client relationship and creative direction. After launch, FatLab transitioned into the direct hosting, maintenance, security, and performance management role. This is a common pattern in FatLab's agency partnerships, where the sites we build become long-term managed clients.
The ISS-USA website serves two distinct purposes that need to coexist without friction. First, it tells the organization's story to potential supporters, partner agencies, and families seeking help. Second, it provides a professional, secure donation infrastructure that converts visitor interest into financial support. These two goals demand different things from a website. Storytelling requires editorial flexibility and visual polish, while fundraising requires payment security, recurring billing, and donor confidence.
FatLab built a custom WordPress platform that delivers both. A GiveWP donation ecosystem handles the full donation lifecycle from initial gift through recurring subscriptions and fee recovery. At the same time, 19 flexible content layouts enable ISS-USA's team to compose and update pages without developer involvement. Constant Contact integration keeps donors and supporters engaged through email marketing, and a custom FatLab Schema Wizard plugin ensures the site's content is properly structured for both traditional search engines and emerging AI-powered discovery.
The Donation Platform
How GiveWP Works
The donation infrastructure is built on a 7-plugin GiveWP ecosystem that handles every aspect of online giving. GiveWP Core provides the donation form engine, while six extension plugins add payment processing, recurring billing, fee recovery, form customization, post-donation messaging, and spam protection.
The full GiveWP plugin stack:
| Plugin | Role |
|---|---|
| GiveWP Core | Donation form engine and donor management |
| Stripe Gateway | Payment processing with credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH |
| Recurring Donations | Monthly, quarterly, and annual subscription billing |
| Fee Recovery | Option for donors to cover processing fees |
| Form Field Manager | Custom fields on donation forms |
| Per-Form Confirmation Pages | Unique thank-you pages per donation form |
| reCAPTCHA | Bot protection on all donation forms |
ISS-USA runs 3 active donation forms that have collectively processed 400+ donations through Stripe. The Stripe integration supports multiple payment methods, including credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and ACH bank transfers, with 3D Secure authentication available for an additional layer of fraud protection. Donors choose their preferred payment method at checkout, and Stripe handles tokenization and processing without any card data touching the WordPress server.
Recurring Giving
Recurring donations are the backbone of sustainable nonprofit fundraising, and the GiveWP Recurring Donations plugin gives ISS-USA full subscription management. Donors can choose monthly, quarterly, or annual giving frequencies when making their gift, and Stripe handles the automatic billing on schedule.
The system manages the full subscription lifecycle: automatic charges on the scheduled date, renewal notification emails, retry logic for failed payments, and donor-initiated cancellation. ISS-USA administrators can view and manage all active subscriptions from the GiveWP dashboard, including payment history, upcoming renewal dates, and subscription status for every recurring donor.
Fee Recovery
Every credit card donation incurs processing fees, reducing the net amount that reaches the organization. GiveWP's Fee Recovery plugin addresses this by presenting donors with the option to cover processing fees in addition to their gift. When a donor opts in, the platform calculates the fee amount and adds it to the transaction total, so ISS-USA receives the full intended donation amount.
This is a meaningful revenue optimization for a nonprofit. Across hundreds of donations, the cumulative effect of fee recovery represents a material increase in funds available for ISS-USA's intercountry casework programs.
Per-Form Confirmations
Each of the 3 donation forms is configured with its own confirmation page through the Per-Form Confirmation Pages plugin. Rather than routing all donors to a single generic thank-you page, ISS-USA can tailor the post-donation experience based on which form the donor used. This creates opportunities for targeted messaging. A donor who gives to a specific program can see a confirmation page with details about that program's impact, while a general fund donor might see a broader organizational update.
Technical Implementation
Custom Theme Architecture
The site runs a custom UnderStrap theme built on Bootstrap 4.6.0. UnderStrap provides the WordPress-Bootstrap bridge, and the custom theme extends it with 33 SCSS source files that define ISS-USA's visual identity. The theme includes 29 include files that handle template parts, custom functionality, and layout components.
A standout feature is the dynamic brand color system powered by ACF Pro. Rather than hardcoding colors throughout the SCSS, the theme pulls primary, secondary, and tertiary brand colors from ACF theme options. It converts them to RGBA values for use across the site. This means ISS-USA can adjust its brand palette from the WordPress admin without editing any code. The system extends into the content editor through TinyMCE integration, making brand colors available as text and background color options when staff create content.
The theme also provides 8 preset Google Font combinations that are selectable from the theme options. Each preset defines a coordinated heading and body font pairing, letting ISS-USA change the site's entire typographic feel from a single dropdown. This level of visual configurability means the site can evolve its look over time without requiring edits to theme files.
Content Management
ACF Pro drives the editorial experience with 9 field groups containing 222 custom fields. The core of the content system is the 19 flexible content layouts that give ISS-USA's team composable page-building capabilities:
| Layout Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Heroes | Full-width hero sections with image backgrounds |
| Content Blocks | Content-with-image, multi-column text, accordions |
| Media | Carousels, parallax sections, video embeds |
| Engagement | Call-to-action blocks, testimonial displays |
| Specialized | Landing page layouts, custom section builders |
Each layout is a self-contained module with its own ACF fields, template partial, and SCSS styling. Staff can assemble pages by stacking layouts in any order, previewing the result, and publishing without developer involvement. This modular approach means ISS-USA can create new landing pages for campaigns, events, or program launches entirely through the WordPress editor.
The ACF Options Page provides site-wide settings beyond the standard WordPress options: brand colors, font selections, social media links, and global call-to-action content that can be referenced across multiple pages.
Email Marketing Integration
ISS-USA runs 5 Gravity Forms that handle all non-donation interactions on the site, including contact requests, newsletter signups, and event registrations. These forms integrate directly with Constant Contact for email marketing, automatically syncing form submissions into subscriber lists without manual data entry.
This integration creates a closed loop between the website and email outreach. A visitor who signs up for updates through a Gravity Form is automatically added to the appropriate Constant Contact list, where ISS-USA's marketing team can include them in future campaigns. The automatic subscriber sync eliminates the data gap that occurs when form submissions sit in the WordPress database and never reach the email marketing platform.
Schema and Search Visibility
The FatLab Schema Wizard (v1.0.4) is a custom-built plugin that generates AI-optimized structured data markup for ISS-USA's content. The plugin supports 11 schema types and includes intelligent features that produce clean, accurate, structured data.
Key capabilities include conflict detection, which identifies when multiple schema sources might generate contradictory markup, and duplicate suppression, which prevents the same schema type from being output twice on a single page. The plugin generates a schema optimized not just for traditional Google rich results but also for AI-powered search experiences that are increasingly driving how users discover nonprofit organizations and their services.
For a nonprofit like ISS-USA, proper schema markup means their services, events, and organizational information appear correctly in search results, knowledge panels, and AI-generated summaries. The Schema Wizard handles this automatically across all content types without requiring staff to understand structured data.
Accessibility
ISS-USA serves a diverse international audience, making accessibility a priority rather than an afterthought. The site uses the UserWay Accessibility Widget, which provides compliance coverage under WCAG 2.2, the ADA, Section 508, and the European Accessibility Act (EAA).
Beyond the UserWay overlay, the theme itself is built with accessibility in mind. A custom ARIA walker ensures the navigation menu outputs proper ARIA attributes for screen readers, and the theme's HTML follows semantic markup conventions throughout. This layered approach means the site's accessibility does not depend solely on a third-party widget. The underlying markup is sound even without it.
Plugin Stack
The site runs 28 active plugins, each serving a defined role:
| Category | Key Plugins | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Donations | GiveWP Core + 6 extensions | Complete donation platform with Stripe, recurring gifts, fee recovery |
| Payment | Stripe Gateway | Credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, 3D Secure |
| Content Management | ACF Pro | 9 field groups, 222 fields, 19 flexible layouts, theme options |
| Forms | Gravity Forms (5 forms) | Contact, newsletter, event registration, Constant Contact sync |
| Email Marketing | Constant Contact | Automated subscriber management from Gravity Forms |
| Custom | FatLab Schema Wizard (v1.0.4) | AI-optimized structured data across 11 schema types |
| Accessibility | UserWay | WCAG 2.2, ADA, Section 508, EAA compliance |
| Social | Instagram Feed Pro (Smash Balloon) | Social content integration |
| Engagement | Popup Maker | Donation appeals and newsletter signup prompts |
| Icons | Font Awesome Pro | Icon library for UI elements |
| Email Delivery | Mailgun | Transactional email with SPF/DKIM authentication |
| Performance | Breeze, Imagify | Page caching and image optimization |
| SEO | Yoast SEO | Search optimization and metadata management |
Security and Infrastructure
After the white-label build wrapped, FatLab transitioned into the direct infrastructure role for ISS-USA. FatLab provides the managed hosting and security behind the donation platform. For a nonprofit processing financial transactions, trust starts at the server level. Donors need to know their payment information is handled in a secure, professionally managed environment. FatLab's ongoing support ensures the platform remains stable, up to date, and monitored.
Cloudflare provides WAF protection, CDN distribution, and DDoS mitigation in front of the application layer. Breeze handles page caching with Varnish integration, and Imagify optimizes uploaded images to keep page weights manageable. Mailgun handles all transactional email delivery with proper SPF and DKIM authentication, ensuring that donation receipts, form confirmations, and system notifications reach recipients reliably.
The donation infrastructure benefits from Stripe's PCI-DSS compliance. No payment card data ever touches the WordPress server, and all sensitive payment processing happens within Stripe's certified environment. The GiveWP reCAPTCHA plugin adds bot protection to donation forms, preventing automated submissions from polluting donation records.
Results and Impact
The ISS-USA platform demonstrates that WordPress with GiveWP can deliver a complete nonprofit donation infrastructure without the overhead of WooCommerce or a third-party fundraising SaaS. The 7-plugin GiveWP ecosystem gives ISS-USA everything they need for online giving: three active donation forms, Stripe processing with multiple payment methods, recurring gift subscriptions at monthly, quarterly, and annual intervals, donor fee recovery, and per-form confirmation pages for targeted post-donation messaging. With 400+ donations processed through the platform, the system has proven itself in production.
Beyond the donation platform, the site gives ISS-USA's team genuine editorial independence. The 19 flexible content layouts, powered by 222 ACF custom fields, allow new pages, campaign landing pages, and content updates to happen without a developer in the loop. The dynamic brand color system and configurable font pairings extend that independence to visual identity changes. Constant Contact integration through Gravity Forms closes the gap between website interactions and email marketing outreach.
The FatLab Schema Wizard positions ISS-USA for the changing search environment. As AI-powered search experiences become a primary discovery channel for nonprofit services, having clean, complete, structured data across 11 schema types ensures that ISS-USA's intercountry casework services, organizational information, and donation opportunities surface accurately. Combined with UserWay accessibility compliance and a theme built on semantic HTML and ARIA navigation, the platform serves ISS-USA's diverse international audience at every level: from discoverability to usability to the moment a supporter decides to give.
Results
- 400+ donations processed through the GiveWP and Stripe platform
- Recurring donation support with monthly, quarterly, and annual subscription options
- Fee recovery option increasing net revenue per donation
- 19 flexible content layouts enabling self-service page management
- AI-optimized schema markup across 11 structured data types
- WCAG 2.2, ADA, and Section 508 accessibility compliance