Your donation page is arguably one of the most important on your entire website. A good one should draw supporters in and make giving easy. Not slow them down or leave them second-guessing.
But even small issues can introduce friction and get in the way of a smooth, successful donation experience.
And when giving feels too difficult or confusing, many people simply won’t follow through — no matter how much they care about your cause.
If you’re ready to make giving easier and raise more funds, you’re in the right place! Discover what your Donate page actually needs to do and five practical steps you can take to level it up.
Video Transcript
This webinar was originally part of our Nonprofit Website Office Hours series. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Your Donate page is obviously one of the most important pages of your nonprofit’s website. But getting it right can be really tough, right? Especially when it feels like every tool and every study and every best practice is pulling us in a different direction.
We’ve seen a lot of donation pages over the years working with all kinds of different nonprofits, and we’ve seen two common issues come up time and time again:
- One is focusing too much on specific kinds of tools or tech or platforms as a solution for fundraising issues.
- And the second issue is assuming that visitors who land on your donation page have already decided to give.
But even the best tools can only do so much. And a visitor’s curiosity doesn’t always mean that they’re actually going to commit to making the donation. If your Donate page isn’t helping folks feel confident and motivated to act, many folks will just not follow through.
These common issues can dramatically weaken this key page and make it harder to raise funds for your mission.
And speaking of, it feels important to speak to the moment that we find ourselves in, in the nonprofit sector. We know this is a really tough time when it comes to fundraising, especially for folks in the United States, but it’s hitting organizations all over the world.
As revenue sources become less predictable, or dry up completely, a lot of organizations are being forced to focus more on unrestricted individual giving. And this topic feels especially important in that context.
So our goal, with all of that in mind, is to share actionable advice and five high-impact steps that you can take to level up your Donate page, regardless of what tools or tech you’re using.
What Your Donate Page Needs to Do
Before we can level up our main donation page, it’s worth getting clear on what we mean and what the page actually needs to do first.
When we talk about your Donate page, we’re talking about your general donation page with your main donation form. If your site has a Donate button in your navigation, this is most likely the page that folks are going to when they click that button.
People landing on this kind of general donation page will have pretty widely different levels of context about your organization, and their motivation for giving will be in a really different place. It’s just a bit different than a campaign-specific fundraising page.
Visitors to those types of pages, those more campaign-specific fundraising pages, typically are more primed to make a donation. They typically have a little more context about your organization and your work and the campaign that they’re potentially getting involved with.
And as a result, the pages that you build for specific campaigns or fundraisers are going to be a bit different than your general Donate page. So today, we’re really focusing on that most common kind of general donation page when we talk about how to level things up.
Now, what does this page actually have to do? Your Donate page really needs to answer one key question in the minds of your visitors: “Why should I give to this organization right now?”
And there are two key parts here. The first is why this organization, which is really talking to your fit — and their fit, really — with your movement and your cause.
And then the second piece is why right now. It’s that sense of urgency. Why should I do this today, instead of putting this off and coming back tomorrow or next week or next month?
We know if people are putting it off, it makes it a lot less likely that they’re actually ultimately going to make a gift. Just think about your own experience.
When you land on a donation page, you’re likely curious about what you’d be giving to and whether your gift will actually make a difference, if this is the right organization to support and whether now is the time to act.
Your prospective donors are running through all of those same doubts and questions in their minds. And again, it’s really important to never assume that visitors to your Donate page have already decided to make a gift.
Honestly, if there’s one thing to take away from this, that would be what I’d recommend. That mindset shift, that a visitor to the Donate page is not necessarily someone who has already decided to make a donation.
And we can really kind of roll all of those questions or thoughts that visitors are having into this single overarching question that your page needs to answer: “Why should I give to this organization right now?”
That’s really the core question that visitors are wrestling with. And your Donate page needs to be able to answer before you’re going to be able to count on anyone actually making a gift through your website.
How to Nail Your Donate Page
So how do we actually go about answering that question? How do we actually drive donors to complete their gift?
We’re going to walk through those five best practices that you can implement on your Donate page. And we’re shooting for practical, high-impact steps that you can take to remove friction in the process, build trust with visitors and ultimately motivate folks to follow through and make that gift today.
As we dive in, just a quick reminder that there are a lot of different tools out there for fundraising and collecting donations. And our goal is to share tips that are broadly applicable, regardless of which tools or technology that you’re using behind the scenes.
And as we always say with topics like this, take what you need, you know, whatever is applicable to your organization and your context, and leave the rest. You know your audience, you know your movement, you know your donors better than anyone else out there.
So again, apply what you need, but don’t feel like you have to do every single thing that we are going to share here in the coming slides.
Eliminate Distractions
First up, eliminate distractions. I’m sure this is something that you’ve heard before. By distractions, we’re really just talking about anything that’s going to draw visitors’ attention away from the action that we want them to take.
When someone lands on your Donate page, our goal is to help them actually follow through with making the gift. And that’s a lot harder if the page feels busy or unfocused.
And the more things competing for a visitor’s attention, the easier it is for them to hesitate or get overwhelmed and ultimately click away — which really undercuts that second part of that question. You know, “Why should I give to this organization right now?” Why is now the right time?
And a focused page just sends a really clear signal to visitors that donating is not only the right action, but it’s the best way for them to get involved and that now is the best time for them to act. So how do we actually go about eliminating distractions? Let’s kind of peel back the layers of that a little bit.
Hide irrelevant or unrelated popups
First, hide any irrelevant or unrelated popup messages from displaying on your donate page. This is one that sounds pretty straightforward, and it’s generally not hard to do. But it is actually really easy to overlook.
A good example of this is maybe you have a popup to drive email signups, or maybe you’re running a specific campaign that has a popup, or there’s a news item that has some kind of popup or message bar at the top of your website or something like that.
These can all work really well on most pages of your website — but your Donate page is not the place for them.
Thankfully, most tools that you would use to manage popups on your website offer the ability to set up visibility by page. Just be sure that you’ve hidden these popups on your Donate page and any other kind of distracting messages that might pull visitors’ attention away from the task at hand, which is completing their donation.
Hide your sidebar navigation
Next up, hide your sidebar navigation. This is the list of pages that displays in the sidebar of your page, often on the right side of the page.
It can be really helpful for folks on most pages to know where they’re at in your structure and find related pages. And generally speaking, your sidebar is going to be a lot less distracting than a popup. But it can still pull visitors away from the main action that you’re asking them to take.
And we often see Donate pages housed within a broader Get Involved or Ways to Give or Take Action section of a website, which means there are likely other ways for folks to get involved or support your work outside of making a donation.
Which, in general, is great! You want to meet people where they’re at and give them multiple ways to engage. But listing all of those options right next to the donation form can actually be really distracting.
Here’s an example of a Donate page with a sidebar navigation showing. You can see on the right side there, it has Get Involved with Volunteer Opportunities and Events and Awareness Month.
And you can see how that could easily pull attention away from a potential donor and lead them to wonder if maybe some other action may be a better way for them to engage.
Giving your potential supporters ways to get involved is a great thing — but the Donate page just isn’t the right place to present them with a bunch of other options.
We want to minimize the cognitive load that they’re under and minimize the choices they’re facing and really focus them on completing the donation form. So whenever possible, hide that sidebar navigation.
The specific way that you do this is gonna depend on your website tools. I know some of our clients are here, and if you’re using our platform, you can use a full width page template as a way to hide the sidebar.
There are also ways to actually just remove the navigation from the sidebar and leave the sidebar if you’re going to do some other things with that space. But the key takeaway here is to limit those off ramps that people have when it comes to getting to other pages of the website.
Limit links in your page content
And for similar reasons, we also recommend limiting the number of links within the content of your Donate page. Just like with the sidebar navigation, these links are those off ramps from your page.
Now, are there times where including a link or two in the content is going to be helpful for visitors? Absolutely! This is not meant to be a hard-and-fast rule that will always be right for every organization.
But in general, providing links away from the action that you want folks to take just starts to muddy the waters in the minds of your visitors. And something you’ll hear us say a lot is a confused mind never converts. A confused mind never converts.
We just want people to have clarity in their minds about what the next step is so that they’re more likely to take it. And when the page becomes sort of distracting or there are other calls to action to explore, it becomes easier for visitors to doubt whether this is the right action to take and whether it’s urgent enough to require them to act in this moment.
Simplify your header (to the extent you can)
And finally, simplifying your website’s header can also go a long way toward reducing distraction. So what do we mean when we say a simple header here? I think a quick example will help.
This is an example from an organization called Feeding America, which I know a lot of folks know. They’re a hunger relief organization here in the United States.
This is the hero section of their homepage. And you can see they’ve got a variety of items in their primary and secondary navigation up there at the top. They have that big red Donate button.
But when you click that Donate button, you can see that header at the top is just dramatically simplified.
You can see the logo is still there. We can still tell that we’re engaging with the same organization. But we can’t see the other items in the navigation anymore.
Take Action, Our Work, Find a Food Bank — all of those things have been stripped out. And as a result, it’s very easy for the donor to stay focused on the action of actually completing their donation.
It’s worth mentioning at the bottom of their page, they do actually keep their footer that shows up at the bottom of every page. And the logo up here is clickable, so visitors can get back to the homepage. They don’t feel like they’re stuck on an island with no way back. But again, simplifying the header can go a long way toward minimizing distractions.
Now this is one where it’s really important to put that caveat of “to the extent you can” on because this sort of flexibility isn’t always possible or super easy to achieve throughout your website, but definitely aligns with just the bigger picture takeaway of eliminating distractions for potential donors.
Make a Strong Case to Give
In addition to limiting distractions, there are a lot of other things you can do to level up your Donate page. And the next one here is to make a strong, compelling case to give.
Again, we just don’t want to make that mistake of assuming that every visitor has already made up their mind to make a donation. Many folks are still deciding, and your Donate page is actually going to play a crucial role in what decision they ultimately make.
Unfortunately, a lot of organizations just don’t take advantage of this opportunity. Instead, they’ll just drop a couple of generic sentences on top of the page, or they’ll jump right into the donate form.
But many visitors are still making up their mind. And by making a compelling case to give, you’re helping them make that decision and really clarifying that big question in their mind: “Why should I give to this organization right now?”
Communicate your differentiated value
To do that, you’re going to need to get clear, first of all, on your differentiated value. And then you want to communicate that on your Donate page.
When we talk about differentiated value, this is just the way that you help that other organizations can’t or don’t. It’s really what makes you unique, you know, what sets you apart.
And for many, it’s actually going to be the reason that they decide to get involved. Again, we just can’t assume that everybody who visits the page already knows who you are and what you do and how you’re different and why they should give. That’s something that your Donate page should really make clear in a concise way for your visitors.
Use clear, specific language
Next up, when thinking about the content of your donation page, you’re going to want to use clear, specific language to invite folks to give, rather than relying on vague, generic language.
Why? Most donors aren’t giving to your mission in some kind of broad, general sense.
They’re giving because they want to help create an impact. They’re buying into the vision that you’ve shared. And your page can help them see what impact is possible and why their support is needed right now, creating that sense of urgency.
For a lot of organizations, some variation of your vision statement can actually work really well on your donation page, in this space above your donation form.
And if you succinctly summarize your vision for the future in a compelling way, there’s a good chance that it’s going to draw in the right people. It’s going to strike a chord with those folks that are sort of predisposed to caring about your cause.
Just avoid more generic text here, like “Support our mission” or “Make a difference” or “Give hope.” I see why folks do it. And it certainly is broadly applicable. But it’s just not specific enough.
It just doesn’t do much to communicate that sense of urgency or help a potential donor kind of see the actual impact of their donation, which just means they’re a lot less likely to make a gift.
Stick to text rather than video
And lastly here, try to avoid video. Stick to text. Including an image can work well, but we really want to steer away from video content directly on a donation page.
And there’s actually been multiple A/B tests run. Some of our favorites come from NextAfter, which I’m sure some folks have heard of.
NextAfter runs all kinds of testing on digital marketing for nonprofits. And they’ve found that removing a video from a donation page and using text instead lifts conversion rates. The data is pretty compelling.
Now, videos can be great! We love video as a really powerful tool for storytelling. But there are better places around the website to share these videos than on your Donate page.
They just tend to disrupt the flow and the momentum for visitors on this page and ultimately get in the way of visitors reaching the donation form.
Reinforce Your Credibility
Next up, your page should reinforce your credibility as an organization. And when we think about that kind of key question in your visitor’s mind — “Why should I give to this organization right now?” — your credibility is a really important piece of answering that question.
Every donor who cares about your cause will likely hesitate and ultimately leave if they’re unsure whether your organization is trustworthy or responsible. And they’ll likely go elsewhere, right? If they believe in the cause, but not in your organization specifically.
Now, your donation page is definitely not the place to list every award or every rating or recognition that you’ve ever earned. But it is important for visitors to know that they can trust you to be a responsible steward of their gift. And here’s how you can actually do that.
Make credibility markers visible on the page
First, make credibility markers visible on your page. It could be something like a GuideStar seal or a Charity Navigator logo. Maybe it’s some other type of accreditation that will resonate more with your donors.
Just remember, the Donate page is not a trophy case and or the place to display all of your awards or recognitions. You don’t need to slap a dozen different logos on this page. But a few select sort of visual markers of your credibility and transparency can definitely provide some reassurance, especially to new donors.
So consider adding a small logo or two to your donation page. You can put it near the form. You can put it in the sidebar, if your page does have a sidebar. You can even put it in the footer, which would appear on every page of your website.
Here’s an example from one of our clients, Berkeley Community Scholars. You can see they have a sidebar here, and they’ve put the GuideStar Platinum Seal of Transparency right there on the side of the page.
It’s not huge. It doesn’t get in the way of the form. But it is present, it’s accessible on the page, and it can provide some reassurance for a new donor visiting the page.
And you can also see they’ve done a lot of other things well here. They have a compelling headline. They’ve shared a few sentences about the impact. They’ve shown how donations are used. (We’re going to get into some of those in a few minutes!) But they’re doing a lot of things really well on this particular page.
Display your EIN or equivalent info
And along those lines, another simple way to reinforce your credibility is to display your EIN on the Donate page.
So for anyone who doesn’t know that term, EIN is your employer identification number. It’s assigned by the government here in the United States when you register as an organization. For international organizations, a lot of folks will have an equivalent type of registration identification number.
And those can serve as credibility markers. You just show your EIN or equivalent info on the page, and it kind of puts visitors’ minds at ease. They know that you’re a legitimate registered organization.
This identifying number is often tied to your organization, and folks can go look it up if they wanted to, they could go verify that you are who you say you are. Almost no one will, but just by listing it, you can help sort of instill that sense of trust.
You can definitely put it in the page content itself. Another really effective place to put this is in the footer of your website. It can work really well because it isn’t distracting, but it does show up on every page of your website.
Either way, providing that information upfront is a really easy way to put your donors at ease and reinforce your credibility as a nonprofit.
Ensure consistency with your branding
And next, make sure that the look and feel of your donation page matches the rest of your branding. So what do we mean here? As we’ve talked about, there are a variety of tools out there that folks use for fundraising.
It might be a form that’s built natively, directly into your website. You might be embedding a form on your website from a third-party tool. Or you might send visitors away from your website altogether to another URL where they’re actually going to make their gift.
No matter which kind of approach you’re taking, it should still look and feel like part of your organization’s online ecosystem.
A generic payment page without any type of real branding, like your colors or your logo, could set off a red flag for your visitors. And it introduces a bunch of friction into the donation process, which can be enough to derail a fair amount of online giving.
And this is especially true if you’re pushing off of your website to a third-party donation where, you know, the URL actually changes. Donors who are sent offsite to make their gift are already at a higher risk of dropping off. And when the look of that page doesn’t match the branding of your site, that risk goes up pretty substantially.
So no matter what tool or platform you’re using, do whatever you can to make your donation form and the page that it’s housed within look like your overall brand. You really do not want visitors wondering if they’re in the right place at any point throughout the donation process.
Here’s an example I think that makes it pretty clear. First up, this is an organization using a pretty generic third-party form. It is functional. It processes payments. But it’s pretty plain and generic.
And the form, as well as the page it’s embedded on, just don’t really match the overall branding of the website. And that experience can be pretty jarring for visitors and kind of give them pause, which is really what we’re trying to eliminate as part of the giving process.
Now, alternatively, here’s one of our clients, the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. They’re linking out off their website to a page that’s hosted by Raisley for donations. So this is not directly within their website.
But their branding still makes it crystal clear that you’re making a gift to their organization, right? Like, you’ve actually jumped to a new tool, but the process feels very seamless for visitors and makes it a lot more likely that donors will complete the process of making a donation.
Keep your Financials and Impact pages up to date
Lastly, don’t forget to keep your Financials and your Impact pages up-to-date. Now, this isn’t really limited to the scope of your Donate page, so we’re not going to spend a ton of time here. (Maybe we’ll cover these pages in a future Office Hours!)
But these pages are often a key piece of your donor’s journey, and they go a long way toward establishing and reinforcing your credibility. So it felt like an omission to us to not include them here.
So when it comes to these pages, we recommend including things like your 990s, up-to-date financial reports or audits, annual reports can work well, high-level impact stats can also work well — things along those lines. Just an extra layer of transparency and extra layer of credibility.
Use Giving Levels to Drive Action
Next, use giving levels on your Donate page to help drive folks to action. You might also hear giving levels called “gift arrays” or “giving options.”
We’re going to get into the donation form itself here in just a minute and how these giving options come into play. But first, we want to underscore the value of telling folks on the page itself what those donation amounts can actually do.
Detailing clear, impact-oriented giving levels helps donors quickly understand what their gift will do. And listing those levels in your form makes it even easier for them to select an amount and ultimately make a gift, both of which, really, are essential to answering that key question: “Why should I give to your organization right now?”
It really just tells donors why they should give and, again, makes it easy for them to do it right in the moment. So really ticking both sides of that question.
How do we actually do that?
Tell donors what gifts of various amounts can support
First, spell it out, right? Tell donors what gifts of various amounts will support.
I know it might be tricky to kind of crunch the numbers and find ways to translate dollars into impact, depending on the nature of your work, but I promise it’s a worthwhile effort.
And not only does it provide some transparency about how donations are used, but it can also help the donor picture the impact of their gift by connecting dollar amounts to specific outcomes or results. And then it also just kind of invites the donor to picture themselves as playing a more active role in that impact.
Here’s a great example from one of our clients, Northside Youth and Senior Service Center.
Not only does this paint a clear picture for donors of how their gift helps, but it also helps to showcase the wide variety of ways that they serve the community. They’ve picked out giving levels that touch on a bunch of different programs to show the breadth of their work, which I think is an added side benefit.
Here’s another example from a client of ours, Swimdo. And they took a different approach. Rather than listing the giving levels on their Donate page itself, they actually listed a variety of both one-time and monthly giving amounts on their Take Action page.
And each has its own description. Each has its own photo. And then when you click on one, it actually takes you to the donation form where that frequency and that amount have been pre-populated for the donor.
If I click on “Teach an entire class to swim” — the $250 level — when I go to the page, my one-time gift is selected and $250 is already selected. So I don’t have to click those. I can just go right into completing the donation process.
List giving levels on your form — but limit them
Now, once folks have an idea of where their donation can provide support, make it easy for them to donate by listing those giving levels on your form. This is another kind of easy win to knock out if you aren’t already listing specific giving amounts on your form.
So review your form and make sure a few amounts are listed for prospective donors. But a quick word of caution here. Listing too many amounts can actually make it more difficult for folks to make a selection.
There’s no kind magic number. There’s no universal rule for exactly how many to include. But research suggests somewhere in the neighborhood of four to six giving levels — including an option to select “Other” and write in an amount — is a really good place to start.
Not only does that kind of help set donors expectations by providing a sense of what a typical, meaningful gift looks like, but it also reduces friction during the process of actually completing and submitting that form.
Order giving levels from low to high
And while you’re at it, make sure that your giving levels are ordered from low to high. So start with your lowest option and increase them in order.
You might have heard, or might kind of think, that listing them from larger to smaller will actually prompt folks to make larger gifts, or make the options in the middle look a little bit more attractive by comparison.
But research suggests otherwise. Ordering them from high to low can actually send the message that smaller or more modest donations aren’t as valuable.
We probably don’t need to tell you that even smaller donations can add up and make a big difference, especially right now. And also give you the opportunity to start building relationships with those smaller donors.
Consider a preselected amount
And finally, consider defaulting or preselecting an amount on your donation form. So for example, rather than simply presenting the options and letting the donor choose, you might pre-select one of the giving levels, maybe the first or the second donation amounts.
We’ve also seen this approach applied to donation frequency too. You know, if you’re really focused on monthly gifts, you could preselect monthly and then allow people to go select a one-time gift instead.
Now, a really important point: donors absolutely need the ability to select another option or enter their own amount. And you also want to make it very clear that the amount has been pre-selected. You don’t want anyone accidentally making a monthly gift and not expecting to.
But there is some research to suggest that defaulting to having some options selected can increase the overall conversion rate and sort of tip people toward the options that have been preselected — meaning that visitors are more likely to complete the page overall and make selections based on whatever you’ve preselected on the form.
Make Your Form Easy to Complete
The final step that we’re going to cover is making your donation form as easy as possible to complete.
You’ve already done the hard work, right? You’re keeping your donors focused on the page, you’re making a strong, compelling case, you’re showcasing your credibility. Now it’s time to bring it all home by making your actual donation form as simple and painless as you possibly can.
Remember, your Donate page needs to answer that one question: “Why should I give to this organization right now?”
And when you provide a simple, streamlined donation form, after all the other steps you’ve already taken, it makes it really easy to complete that “give now” portion, without any hassle and makes it much more likely that someone will actually give right now.
Because even a highly motivated donor can stall out if the form is too confusing or too long or too difficult to use. And the last thing you want is some friction, right at the finish line, being what derails a donor from completing the process.
Limit your form fields
The first way we’re going to streamline our forms is by limiting the number of fields. And really be ruthless here.
A good question to ask yourself is, “Can we process this donation successfully without this piece of information?” And if the answer is yes, we can process this without this info, then seriously consider trimming that field from your form.
There’s a tendency to ask for a lot of additional information that would be nice to have. And often the purpose is we want to have more nuance to our donor lists. We want to maybe do some segmentation or some personalization.
Asking for a lot of nice-to-have information — like phone numbers, mailing addresses, how did you hear about us or relationship to our organization, all of that kind of stuff — adds a lot of friction to the process and just gives people more chances to drop off from completing their gift.
Stick to the details you absolutely need to know, and consider maybe collecting some of that other information in future communications.
Maybe a thank-you email that asks for more details that they’re willing to share. Or even in the post donation experience, you could find ways to have a secondary form where people can answer additional questions that are tied to their donor record. Really try to streamline the actual donation process to the best of your ability.
Simplify the layout of remaining fields
Next up, simplify the layout of your remaining form fields. So you’ve cut your form down, you’ve trimmed it as tightly as you can. Now you want to make sure it’s presented in a way that looks as easy to complete as possible.
One common way that folks undercut this is by stacking all their fields on top of one another, which can make your form look really long and more complex than it actually is. Here’s a quick example.
You’ll see this is the beginning of a Donate form. The visitor’s being asked to select their donation frequency at one-time or monthly, and then those giving levels are showing up. It’s just laid out in a way that is pretty visually taxing.
But compare that now to this example.
Here’s the exact same information, it’s the exact same info we’re collecting. But it’s laid out in a way that’s just a lot more straightforward and attractive and clear, right?
It’s easier to click on, and grouping fields together makes it a little bit easier. They laid out fields in columns instead of just stacked vertically. Which makes it a lot shorter, makes it a lot less visually overwhelming by making it look long.
It just makes the donation form feel like less work, which is going to lead to more donors actually filling it out.
Stick to single-page forms
Next up, we recommend sticking to a single-page donation form whenever possible, rather than a multi-step or multi-page form.
You know, the more steps someone has to take to complete an action, the more opportunities they have to drop off. Especially if they don’t have a great sense of how many steps there are in the whole process.
And that’s actually one of the big benefits of a single-page form. It’s immediately clear to a potential donor what they need to do in order to complete their gift. There’s no wondering how many steps are in the process.
The team over at NextAfter did a bunch of tests here, and they have never tested a multi-step donation form that outperformed a good, strong single-page form. In fact, in one study, they converted a multi-page donation form into a single page form, and it resulted in nearly a 20% increase in donations.
So, some pretty compelling data to back up that whenever possible, it’s good to stick to a single-page, streamlined donation form.
Offer a variety of trusted payment methods
Next up, offer a variety of trusted payment options. We’re not talking so much here about making an online gift versus sending in a check or anything like that.
We’re talking about providing a variety of online payment methods, including digital wallets like Apple Pay or PayPal. When you make it easier to donate, it’s more likely that someone’s actually going to follow through.
And as digital wallets, like Apple Pay or Google Pay, become even more mainstream, visitors are getting increasingly comfortable with using those to make purchases.
It’s just a great way to reduce friction during the process, and the research backs that up. Classy did a study, The State of Modern Philanthropy, and they found an 11–14% increase in mobile conversion rates when organizations use digital wallets.
And in their Why America Gives report, they also found that one in five donors reconsidered donating when a nonprofit didn’t include their preferred payment method.
Here’s an example of a donation form with a variety of payment methods.
You can see a typical credit card in here, but also Apple Pay and a bank transfer, using ACH. It just makes it easy for potential donors to pick the way they would like to pay.
And here’s another example of a form using PayPal and Venmo.
It can take a lot of different forms, but the whole point here is to make it easy for donors to give using whatever payment method they prefer!
Review and test your form on mobile
And last, but certainly not least, make sure your donation form looks good and works well on mobile devices.
Obviously this applies to your whole website, not just your donation form — but it’s especially important for your donation form and double important if you’re using a third- party tool embedded on your website.
Because sometimes, these get really wonky. Sometimes they look really good on a desktop but not necessarily good on a smaller screen, like on your phone. As mobile traffic continues to increase, it’s essential that your form is easy to use for folks that are browsing on their phone.
Otherwise, you’re just excluding a really large share of potential donors from being able to support your work. So take it for a test drive, and complete the whole process on your phone. Make sure that it’s providing the seamless experience you want it to.
That’s it! Again, those five ways you can dial in your Donate page: Eliminate distractions; make a strong case to give; reinforce your credibility; use giving levels to drive action; and make your form as easy as possible to complete.
Together, these steps should help answer that key question in the mind for all your prospective donors — “Why should I give to this organization right now?” — and ultimately turn more casual website visitors into active donors and supporters of your cause.
Comments