Why Donation Page Content Turns Away 83% of Potential Donors
New Donation Page A/B Testing Data Reveals 7 Ways Nonprofits of Every Size Can Increase Their Conversion Rates
How much more donation money can your nonprofit collect just by improving your donation page content?
Look at it this way:
Suppose your donation page gets 1000 visitors per month, and that only 100 of them actually donate. If you could cause that number to double simply by making changes to your donation page content, would you want to do it?
What’s so valuable about this is that it doesn’t require any new website traffic. It only seeks to improve the donation page conversion rate for the traffic you’re already getting. Getting new traffic takes a lot of work from your web, email, and social media marketing. But boosting the conversion rate for your existing traffic – you can do that by just improving the copy on one page.
Which is easier? More new traffic, or better connection with existing traffic?
NextAfter has recently come out with another data-rich and valuable report called the State of Nonprofit Donation Pages. We will be exploring data from several aspects of this report in the coming weeks. Today, the focus is on donation page content.
First, a bit about the study.
The Most Shocking Statistic in the Entire Report
NextAfter donated $20 to 203 nonprofit websites of all different sizes and sectors. They asked 27 questions related to the giving process on each page, and five questions about the thank you and confirmation process. They used this to create a grading system, and evaluated the 203 nonprofits of a variety of metrics.
However, the most alarming statistic of the entire report is buried in the middle. NextAfter tried to donate to 240 nonprofits. But 37 of them, more than 15% of the total, had dysfunctional donation pages and they were unable to complete the donation process.
15%!!!
That’s almost incomprehensible. Arguably the most important page and process on 15% of nonprofit websites doesn’t even work. How much money are these nonprofits losing because their donation pages don’t work? Do they even know about it? I hope NextAfter kindly informed these 37 nonprofits of the costly state of their donation pages.
Moving on…
Overall Finding – Make Donating More Valuable and Easier
We would summarize the overall finding from the NextAfter report in this way:
You will increase your donation page conversion rate by giving more value and incentive to donate, and reducing the difficulty in doing so.
What is valuable to a donor? It’s whatever they care about, and the ease with which they can accomplish it. Thus, your donation page needs to specify the need the donor can meet, be clear about it, and give adequate motivation to fulfill their desire by giving. The donor should know the purpose of their gift. They should also be able to trust you and believe you’re the best organization to carry out that purpose. Let’s summarize all that.
Here’s what your donation page content must achieve for donors:
- Clarity
- Needs being met
- Impact
- Motivation and desire
- Purpose of the gift
- Credibility of the organization
- Exclusivity – that yours is the best nonprofit for this task
How do you do all that? Not by adding pretty colors or pictures. You do it by focusing on your donation page copywriting. Here’s what NextAfter found 203 nonprofits were doing with their donation page copy.
4 Revealing Donation Page Statistics – What Nonprofits Are Doing (or Not Doing)
26% of nonprofits buried their headline in a banner or an image. While there will be a lot of variation here, in general it is harder to read text when it overlays an image or a color. Contrary to what most web designers wish was true, black text on white background remains the easiest to read, and it’s not likely to budge.
Your primary message must be impossible to miss and easy to understand. You can be boring and get read. Or be ‘innovative’ and get ignored.
Okay – that was just the warmup. Here are the three stats we want to focus on:
33% had a strong value proposition – the reason to give – on their donation pages. Therefore, 67% did not.
61% of nonprofits used fewer than four sentences of copy in their donation page content.
29% had less than one sentence. For those who are slow at math… that’s zero.
We’re going to unpack these and look at some experiments suggesting why every nonprofit should pay close attention to where they would find themselves in these stats.
Testing Experiments on Donation Page Content
NextAfter has run thousands of A/B tests on donation pages, and their research has consistently found that it is the copy that motivates people to give more than anything else in your donation page content. It’s not the images, or the videos, or the graphics, or the fonts.
Those things matter, and they can move the needle a bit more when optimized.
But the copywriting is where you’ll earn the greatest gains.
The donation page report walks through several dozen testing experiments that give weight to the general findings and commentary on the statistics.
I’d like to share a few of these experiments in brief. However, respecting NextAfter’s copyright, you will need to get their full report to see the actual screenshots. It’s free.
Experiment 1 – One sentence vs four paragraphs
One experiment tested a donation page with one sentence of copy with another version that had several paragraphs, a headline, and much more motivation to give.
The longer page earned 150% more donations.
Experiment 2 – No copy vs two sentences
Another experiment involved a site with zero copy on their donation page. They tested a page with no copy against a page with just a couple sentences. So, this is sort of like coming up to the level that the nonprofit in Experiment 1 started at. But still, no copy vs short copy – what happens?
The page with copy earned a 28% increase in donations.
Experiment 3 – Images vs long form copy
NextAfter performed another test comparing a donation page with four graphic design images against a page with long form copy. So this was a pretty extreme difference. The images named the types of donor you could become, such as Sponsor, Friend, and Contributor. The long form copy page was very long, with feature-rich language, subheadings, bullet points, probably over 1000 words.
The long form page earned 146% more donations.
Are you seeing the pattern here?
We’re not done yet.
Experiment 4 – Video vs text
In this test, one page featured a video surrounded by some copy. The video featured someone from the organization delivering a personal message about why the donor should give. The other page in the test simply took the words from the video and converted them to text. So, this is the exact same message, in video form and in text form.
The text version increased donations by… are you ready for this one?
By 560%.
Why? Aren’t we told that everyone watches videos online and no one reads? Video is in. Video is ‘the shizzle.’ Video video video, why aren’t you putting videos your Facebook page? There’s a lot of pressure.
Yes, video is great. It has many powerful uses, and can accomplish things text can never accomplish.
But does video motivate people to give more money to nonprofits, when they’re looking at a page faced with the decision of whether to type their credit card information into this form and click the button?
According to this test, not by a long shot.
Yes, it’s just one test. One video could outperform another. But the idea that video is inherently ‘better’ than copy that people have to read is simply false.
The truth is, it takes most people longer to watch a video than it does to read the text version. Videos are slow. Online audiences want things fast. Video doesn’t deliver on this expectation. Video does get more attention. It can draw more eyeballs. It can attract more leads perhaps. But it is not faster.
Experiment 5 – We vs you
Is it all about the length of copy? Is more always better? No – it’s the content of your donation page copy that matters. What are you saying to donors?
This test compared a page with copy that focused on the organization vs a rewritten version that focused on the donor. The donor-focused page used the word ‘you’ over and over again. The other version did not.
The donor-focused version increased donations by 23%.
There are several more tests in the NextAfter report, all with screenshots, so we’ll stop there. Except that we must conclude with one more.
Experiment 6 – Option to skip the text
Besides video, we’re also told that mobile is everything. Everyone’s on mobile devices, so we have to make all our content work on them. While that’s true (sadly, in this writer’s view), how we make our content work on mobile still requires a lot of discussion.
Mobile screens are smaller and harder to use than desktops or TVs. (But somehow they’re better…again, this writer still hasn’t figured that one out). For this reason, a lot of mobile website versions tend to look for ways to reduce copy.
One experiment gave visitors the option to ‘skip’ the donation page content and just go straight to the donate button. So it featured a ‘Donate Now’ button at the very top of the donation page, allowing the visitor to bypass all the content and go straight to the donation form.
The version with the option to skip the copy decreased donations by 28%.
Get that?
By speeding up the donation process, fewer people gave!
This stuff is both mind-boggling and very simple, all at the same time.
7-Step Donation Page Content Improvement Plan
The takeaway from all these experiments and many more is clear:
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
People need a reason to give. They need clarity – what does my gift accomplish. They need value, trust, desire, and a tangible problem to solve.
If you’d like a quick task-list you can use to go improve your donation page content right now, here’s a summary of what you’ve seen from the testing data and analysis on this page:
- Rewrite your donation page
- If it’s very short (under 4 sentences), make it longer
- Give it a headline and make the headline impossible to miss. Yes, even on mobile
- Focus the content on the donor (you), and not on the organization (we, us, our)
- Focus on what the donor will accomplish by giving to your nonprofit. Be specific, clear, actionable, and emotional
- Reduce your use of video, graphics, and imagery if it’s weighted too heavily on your page
- Tell them what to do
That last one didn’t get tested in the report as far as I saw. But include a sentence telling donors to give. “Fill out the form to give.” “Click the button to donate.” People need to be told what to do. Don’t leave anything to them to guess about. You will lose some of them.
Free Donation Page Evaluation from ProActive Content
ProActive Content creates fundraising copywriting for nonprofits around the world. So far we’ve touched every continent except South America.
If you’d like a free evaluation of your donation page – based on the principles in this article – simply visit this page and send the URL in the comment form along with whatever information you think we need to know.
Then, we will create a brief report about your page that explains what’s working well and areas you can improve.
Want more content? Get weekly nonprofit fundraising and copywriting tips, strategies, and motivations in the ProActive Insights newsletter.
