Top 7 tips for creating online charity donation pages
Increase supporter donations when creating donation pages
The online donation pages on your charity’s website and those for specific appeals play a pivotal role in your fundraising strategy’s success. Our many years’ experience of working with charities has shown us that organisations with effective donation pages will attract more online donations.
With this in mind, we thought we’d share our top tips for creating effective charity donation pages. Web pages that are both preferred by donors and help with conversion rates, leading to increased income and therefore greater possible impact for beneficiaries.
1. Seamless brand experience
Make your brand front and centre so that your donors feel sure about who they are giving to. Your charity’s supporters trust you and your brand, so make sure that your brand is on point at every touchpoint of the customer journey, especially when it comes to donation pages. Seeing a third-party processor can be off putting and cause uncertainty.
2. A donation is not a shopping transaction
If someone is giving, make sure the experience is streamlined, easy, and with no unnecessary obstacles. For example, if a supporter only wants to make a donation, then don’t add the donation to a shopping cart; worse still don’t make it necessary for them to register / login. Barriers like these can put off supporters and impact conversion rates.
3. Make it personal
What will their one-off or monthly gift mean to you and your beneficiaries in quantifiable terms? What impact will they have by giving to you? This can be easily done by showing examples of the impact various donation amounts could have. When the supporter confirms their gift, thank them on screen using their first name; and make it feel personal in the email acknowledgement too.
4. Don’t wear down your supporter with too many questions
Whilst we all want to know as much as we can about our supporters so as to enrich our data and how we communicate, asking too many questions can feel like a blocker to some donors when they’re trying to complete an online donation, and they may give up their attempt if too many obstacles are put in the way of a quick, easy transaction.
5. Fail
Don’t be afraid to test new approaches to your online donation forms to see what works best. Even slight changes can have a significant benefit to your cause and, if they don’t, then you can just swap back easily and put it down to experience!
6. Make sure you include mobile payments
Cover all the payment bases to make it work for your supporters – your payment experience should be as easy as Amazon, well almost! Make sure you have ApplePay, GooglePay and PayPal as options for one-off donations. As new methods come on board such as Open Banking, test these first before rolling out as you want to make sure the payment options work for your audience.
7. Specific appeal online asks
Don’t just stick to the standard home page donation ask. For some campaigns, especially at busy periods of the year or for emergency appeals, it is important to have a separate donation page that works for that specific campaign. If you get the gift value, messaging, images and flow right you should see an increase in supporters backing your cause.
As charity experts in payment processing, Elovate have been building effective donation pages for charity clients for over 21 years now, and we deliver the best solutions to fit not-for-profit needs.
We know this can be another headache for our charity clients, so we deliver the whole process painlessly. Contact us today for a no obligation chat about how we can build quick, easy and effective donation pages for your charity’s website and campaign appeals.