Increase Your Online Donations by 284% in Less than 60 Minutes
Use Real Experimental Data to Improve Your Online Donation Form and Remove Fields that Distract Would-be Donors
Online donation forms represent one of the simplest ways to boost your donations.
Why is this true?
Because the hard part of fundraising comes in attracting and retaining donors. But for those who have already decided to give, all you have to do is make the giving process easy and stay out of their way.
Your donation form, in other words, can be like going through TSA at the airport, or entering a movie theater. Going through TSA is enormously cumbersome, and it’s getting worse. Take off your shoes and coat, remove your laptop, empty your pockets, raise your hands, turn your head and cough. Oh, and then stand around while they search your bag.
But going into a movie theater? Just buy your ticket, let them tear it in half, and go in.
Going into a movie is exciting. Going through TSA is a drag. Don’t make your donation process a drag.
In NextAfter’s report on The State of Online Donation Pages, they analyzed the donation pages of 203 nonprofits. Combining their observations with previous A/B experiments on donation forms, their report offers tremendous insights and actionable tips based on real data…
Here are the key changes you can go make on your donation form right now:
- > Remove your navigation bar from your donation page
- > Get rid of the Captcha
- > Don’t make the phone number a required field (better, just remove it entirely)
- > Don’t complicate the donation process by asking for unnecessary information
Let’s examine these a bit more, including the experimental data behind them.
Remove Your Navigation Bar
Donating is a singular act of generosity. It has a clear goal and a path to get there. But 55% of nonprofits have made it harder to get from A to Donate by leaving their navigation bar and other distracting links on their donation page.
And let’s be clear – this is pretty easy to get wrong because your footer and navigation bar appear on every page of your site automatically. So removing it isn’t something that occurs to most people. But testing data has proven this to be a significant hindrance to donating.
NextAfter ran a simple A/B experiment testing a donation page with a navigation bar against the same page without it. The page without the nav bar saw a 195% increase in donations.
For such a simple and permanent change, this is one of the easiest ways to boost your online giving.
Get Rid of Captcha
Image by Maike und Björn Bröskamp from Pixabay
Everyone hates these. Is it a bane of modern existence we just have to put up with because of all the scammers and bots? Or can we just do without it to simplify everyone’s lives?
That’s a discussion you’ll have to have with your team, considering the pros and cons of using Captcha. You’ll notice that this website does not use one. That’s because ProActive Content’s entire team despises them.
More to the point, this is a clear hindrance to giving. Sometimes the pictures are so blurry and vague that you can’t make out the cars, traffic lights, or palm trees, and you fail to pass. Then you have to scrutinize another set of blurry images.
If simply having a navigation bar – an entirely optional feature to engage with – reduces donations, you can be completely assured that a Captcha has a worse effect. Of the 203 nonprofits in the study, only 8% were using Captcha. If your nonprofit is one of those, ask yourself how 92% of nonprofits seem to be doing okay without it.
Eliminate Required Phone Numbers
There are two reasons requiring a phone number was found to decrease giving by 50% in one A/B test.
First, it’s lot of work to type nine numbers into a field. Second, and perhaps more important, requiring a phone number raises an inevitable question for donors: “Why do they need my number?”
You’re prompting them to ask a question that takes them out of the frame of mind they were in before – which was to donate to your nonprofit.
And it’s valid question. Why do you need their phone number at this point in the giving process? Yes, it is great to have it in the future for things like gratitude and other forms of donor follow-up. But right here, you just want them to give.
NextAfter’s experiments have found that an optional phone number does not depress donation rates, so if you want to have a shot at getting some phone numbers without reducing donations, making the phone number field optional is the way to go.
25% of nonprofits in the report required a phone number.
Don’t Ask for Unnecessary Information
According to NextAfter, 8% of online donation forms require a title, such as Mr. or Ms. Why do you need this information? Does it help simplify the giving process in any way? From a donor’s perspective, it is a hindrance that serves no purpose.
Other information some forms require include questions like:
- > How did you find us?
- > What inspired you to give?
- > What is your birthday?
- > Do you want to designate your gift to a specific fund?
Each of these has an argument in favor of being asked. Though there aren’t many scenarios where a birthday seems relevant in order to donate. Either way, each of these adds an additional step to the donation process. 40% of nonprofits are asking for non-essential information like this.
It’s not just the work required to fill out these fields. The bigger issue is that each of these requires thought, and that act of thinking pulls the donor away from the donation process. Remembering how you found a nonprofit, or why you chose to give, isn’t always simple. You’re making potential donors think about something other than giving, in the middle of your giving page.
Thus, the more fields like this you add in, the more you will depress conversions..
Bonus Tip: Test Your Donation Form Layout
NextAfter also reported several experiments testing different form layouts.
You would need to download their study to see all the screenshots, which are very revealing. In general, purely vertical form layouts do worse than ones that use horizontal space more effectively. For instance, you can put two fields on one line in certain instances. A more compact-looking donation form with features like this was found to increase giving by 39% in one instance.
Put all these experiments together, and you get an idea of the scale of impact you can have on your giving just by improving your donation form.
If you are requiring a phone number, have a vertical layout, and have a navigation bar on your donation form page, and if your conversion rates mirrored those in these studies, you could be suffering from a 284% loss in donations.
Considering you can make all these changes in less than an hour, I’d put that near the top of my to-do list.
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