The Short Answer

Speed, safety and plain language. A service page needs:

  • Urgent help first, in the same place on every page.
  • A way to find the right service by need and by place.
  • An eligibility check that offers somewhere else to go when the answer is no.
  • Information in formats people can use, ready before anyone asks.
  • A referral form that collects the least it needs.

Service pages are usually written to describe a service. They are read by someone trying to find out, quickly, whether it will help them.

The section checklist gives the people a charity serves ten rows of their own, from the services finder to low-bandwidth access. Only two carry a legal duty in Great Britain: accessible information and the referral form. The rest decide whether anyone gets that far.

Urgent Help Comes First

Before a page explains what a service does, it should tell someone in danger what to do now:

  • an "if you are in danger" line
  • the emergency number for each country you work in
  • the helplines people actually need.

What a quick exit protects, and why every number above it needs an owner and a review date, is in what a quick exit button protects.

One point belongs on the service pages themselves: put the urgent-help block in the same place on every page. WCAG 2.2 success criterion 3.2.6 (Consistent Help), at level A, requires that where contact details or a self-help option repeat across a set of pages, they appear in the same relative order.

It does not require you to offer help. It does mean someone who found the helpline on one page finds it again on the next without reading.

Finding the Right Service

No law requires a services finder. It is the difference between a person finding help and a person phoning the wrong office.

Start from what the person knows: what they need help with and where they are. Let them search by need and by place, in their words rather than your programme names. Then give every result the same fields, so a person comparing two services is not decoding two layouts:

  • Who it is for, in one sentence.
  • Where and when, with opening hours and what happens out of hours.
  • How to get in touch, with the number written out as well as a call button.
  • How to start, including whether they can refer themselves.

Opening hours do the most harm when wrong: a stale one sends someone to a closed door. Each service card needs a named owner and the date it was last checked, the same discipline the quick exit post applies to emergency numbers.

A map helps where location matters, but it is heavy. The list should work without it, and the essentials should work on a slow connection and an old phone. That is the subject of designing an NGO website for low bandwidth.

An Eligibility Check That Ends Somewhere

An eligibility check spares a person a referral they were never going to get through. Three to five questions and a plain answer are enough. The design question is not the yes. It is the no.

Every no should name somewhere else to go: a partner, a national helpline or a statutory service, with a working link or number. A no with nothing after it ends the search. Say plainly that the check is a guide, not a decision, and give a way to ask a person when the answer does not fit.

Two build points follow:

  • Keep the answers in the browser unless the person chooses to refer. The questions often touch health or personal circumstances, and a check that quietly sends its answers to an analytics tool has collected sensitive data nobody needed.
  • Do not ask twice. If the check leads into the referral form as one process, criterion 3.3.7 (Redundant Entry), at level A, requires information already entered to be filled in again automatically or offered for selection.

Plain Language and Accessible Formats

Here a legal duty applies. In Great Britain, a service provider owes disabled people a duty to make reasonable adjustments:

That last point makes the duty anticipatory. The Code says providers "must proactively consider the barriers that disabled people could face", before an individual seeks to use a service, and that the duty applies whether or not the provider knows a particular person is disabled. For a service page, the accessible version exists before the first request.

Which formats is your judgement; the Act names none. The Code's own examples include an Easy Read leaflet that a council "should have anticipated", and a museum for which clear accessible language is a likely reasonable step, with Braille or Easy Read depending on its size and resources.

A service for people with learning disabilities that publishes nothing in Easy Read is in a harder position to defend than a small general charity.

Mencap's Easy Read hub, which I loaded on 1 October 2026, says Easy Read helps people with a learning disability and also "people who are short on time or feeling stressed". That second group is everyone a crisis page is written for.

Plain language does not come from passing an audit. WCAG 2.2 puts reading level at 3.1.5, which is level AAA, so a service page can meet AA and still defeat someone who is frightened. Write the top of each service page as answers: who it is for, what happens next and how to start. The wider standard is in website accessibility for nonprofits.

Two more routes:

  • Formats on request, such as large print, audio or BSL: publish how to ask and how long it takes, and make sure the request route does not itself depend on reading dense text.
  • Other languages: the checklist asks for a switcher that names each language in its own script and an offer of an interpreter. Who keeps translated service pages current is in multilingual website governance.

The Referral Form Collects the Least It Needs

Any referral form that collects personal data carries duties under the UK GDPR. Four of them shape the form.

Ask only what the service needs to make contact

Article 5(1)(c) requires personal data to be "limited to what is necessary". For a referral, that means what the service needs to decide whether and how to get in touch, not the whole assessment.

Every extra field is one more thing a person in difficulty must answer before help starts, and one more thing to protect.

Tell people at the point of collection

For a self-referral, Article 13 applies. The ICO's guidance on the right to be informed says privacy information must be given "at the time you collect" the data, in "clear and plain language".

A short notice beside the submit button, with the full notice linked, does that. A long policy behind a link nobody follows does not.

A professional referral involves two people

The referrer's own details come from the referrer, so Article 13 covers them. The person being referred did not give you their data, so Article 14 applies: they must be told within a reasonable period and at the latest within one month, or at the latest at the first contact if their details are used to contact them.

In practice the service's first call or message carries it: who made the referral, what was shared and where the privacy information is. I would also ask the referrer whether the person knows about the referral and how it is safe to contact them.

Health details change the wording, not the page

Health information is special category data, and the ICO says processing it needs both an Article 6 lawful basis and a separate Article 9 condition. Explicit consent is one of ten conditions.

Which one applies is for your data protection lead, and the form's wording follows that decision. A consent tick-box on a form that relies on a different condition offers a choice the person does not have.

Two questions on even the shortest form

  • How the person wants to be contacted, and in what format. The Code treats this as part of the duty: in one of its examples, failing to keep a record of a person's need for an alternative format may be a failure to anticipate.
  • Whether it is safe to call, text or leave a message. This is about safety, for the same reasons a quick exit exists.

Where submissions land, who can read them and what happens out of hours are the questions a safeguarding report raises. They are answered in what a safeguarding page should let people do. Labels, errors and keyboard access are in form design for nonprofit websites.

After the First Contact

The last rows in the checklist's service-user group are about the relationship, not the crisis.

  • A way to complain that states its steps, timescales and anonymity truthfully. The structure is in complaints and speak-up routes.
  • A short feedback form and a record of what changed because of it, which closes the loop.

In the Charity Commission's Public trust in charities 2026 (England and Wales), 18% chose listening to feedback from supporters and service users as important to their trust.

The order of a service page is a decision about who it is for. The page describes the service. The person reading it needs the way in.

Further Reading

What This Post Does Not Cover

This is about the website: what service pages must do, in what order and who keeps them current. It is not legal advice.

Whether a particular adjustment is reasonable is a question for your own adviser, and the lawful basis and condition for a referral form are decisions for your data protection lead.

The Equality Act duties described here are those that apply in Great Britain; I have not covered Northern Ireland. Nor does the post cover how to assess, prioritise or triage a referral once it arrives, which belongs with the people who run the service.