How to Create the Perfect Donate Button

A Quick Analysis of Color, Size, Placement, and Text for Nonprofit Call to Action Buttons, Plus a Free Button Evaluation

donate button is the primary call to action for nonprofits and charities

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The smallest parts of your website can produce the biggest change. Namely, the donate button.

One of the missions of ProActive Content is to find ways to boost fundraising that even the tiniest nonprofits can implement. Your donate button is a terrific example of this. Lots of testing has been done on the four primary characteristics of donate buttons, and today we’ll take a brief look at each:

  • ✓ Color
  • ✓ Size
  • ✓ Placement
  • ✓ Text

Small nonprofits can immensely benefit from research and testing data like this. And the data-driven, conversion-boosting changes you’ll make to your buttons take merely minutes.

Truly – any nonprofit can have a perfect donate button. (Yes, this is non-scientific language. We realize there’s no “perfect” button. But you can have one anyway).

What Color Should Our Donate Button Be?

With color, the data couldn’t clearer. Contrast is everything.

Classy reports that multiple studies showed red buttons outperform green ones. But the underlying reason wasn’t the color red itself. It was the contrast between red and the rest of the site.

To make sure this point is clear, one of our previous clients used red as their primary brand color. For them, a red button was the wrong choice. Contrast is key.

Network for Good saw a 30% increase in donations after changing their buttons from gray to red. 30%, from just a simple change like this. What are you waiting for?

In one of the most detailed and broad fundraising studies of email and recurring giving, Nonprofit Tech for Good saw a 190% increase in donations simply by using buttons with contrasting colors.

190%! What more do you need?

Yet, some nonprofits continue to struggle ‘being okay’ with clashing colors. It’s the designers in us. It doesn’t ‘match.’

That’s the point. It clashes. That means people see it. They must see your donate button in order to click on it. Please – get over any hesitation you have about how your site will “look” if the button clashes with the rest of the colors.

Do you want your colors to match, or do you want more money? That truly is the choice.

How Big Should Our Donate Button Be?

yoda might think size doesn’t matter but bigger is better for your nonprofit’s donate button

Image by ktontour07 from Pixabay

Yoda once said, “Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?”

When it comes to donate buttons, Yoda couldn’t be more wrong. Why? Same reason as color. The more people who see your donate button, the more people will click on it.

Bigger buttons do better. This is true whether it’s on the top of your page in the navigation bar or elsewhere on your web pages. We’ll talk about placement next, so hold on. The simple action step here is, make your buttons big enough so they’re impossible to miss.

And consider your donor base here too. Older donors with weaker eyesight will be less likely to miss bigger buttons with bolder and clearer text on the button. But guess what – so will distracted, multi-tasking millennials. Of course, the older donors are more likely to give, so prioritize for them either way.

Where Should We Put Our Donate Button?

 

Eye-tracking studies have repeatedly shown that people scan web pages in an ‘F’ or a ‘Z’ pattern. They look left to right across the top, and then scan back left and partway across, and then down again, ish.

Therefore, do what most nonprofit sites do, and put your donate button near the top right of every web page. You could also put it on the top left or middle, but that’s often awkward from a design standpoint.

However, you need to do more than that.

Most people who visit your site are not coming to donate. For those who are, the button at the top of the page will do the job.

But what about people reading through multiple pages of your site?

Maybe they read your About page, then a couple of blogs, and then a few pages about your mission and your stories of impact. (You do have pages for all that, right?) At this point, they’re pretty impressed and decide to give.

The button at the top of the page loses its value as this type of visitor looks at more and more pages. If that person decides to give while reading your pages, they likely will not see the button at the top.

That’s why, as appropriate, you should also have large and color-contrasting donate buttons as calls to action at the end of key web pages. You might also want to put one in the footer, so every page has a button at the top AND the bottom, in addition to the customized ones on specific pages just mentioned.

Placement is about making it easy. That means, lots of buttons.

What Should Our Donate Button Say?

So, you’ve got a contrasting button color, a can’t-miss-it size, and your donate button is in a place where most people will see it.

But, what should it say?

‘Donate’ is pretty popular. ‘Donate Now’ and ‘Donate Today’ are frequent as well. But are these the best options?

One interesting study tested 13 different button wordings. They found that softer, less urgent messages gained higher click rates. So, ‘Donate’ outperformed ‘Donate Now,’ for instance.

But in addition to the softer language, you’ll do even better with specificity.

For instance, ‘Feed the Hungry’ will probably do better than just ‘Donate’ or ‘Give.’ Why? It’s specific. The impact of giving is stated on the button. The same article above reports that a Haiti nonprofit changed its button text from ‘Submit’ (which is just terrible… don’t ever use that one) to ‘Support Haiti.’ They saw a 16% increase in donation page conversions.

That’s a lot of money for just two words!

Another tip: For call to action (CTA) buttons farther down the page (so, not the main one on the header or footer), specificity and personalization are good strategies.

Instead of ‘Help Disaster Victims’, say ‘I Want to Help Disaster Victims’.

By personalizing it, you’re aligning the language with what the reader wants to do – if they’re thinking about donating.

For CTAs in emails, direct mail, and other places, personalizing is almost always the strategy we recommend. But for your main buttons that appear on all your web pages, find a short, high-impact, soft-asking phrase or word.

Want Help with Your Donate Button?

ProActive Content will give you a 30-minute Donate Button Evaluation – completely free.

Just send us your URL and ask us to look at your donate button, and we’ll send you a quick evaluation of what you have now, as well as several suggestions for alternative buttons.

Our suggestions will touch on all four areas just discussed – color, size, placement, and text.

Get My Free Donate Button Evaluation

(See that button? Personalized, specific, contrasting, large enough, placed right where you want it. Now all you have to do is click it…).

 

Want more content? Get weekly nonprofit fundraising and copywriting tips, strategies, and motivations in the ProActive Insights newsletter.

Subscribe to ProActive Insights