Is Your Nonprofit’s Site Missing This Webpage?
Ways to Give: The Most Impactful Webpage Missing from over 20% of Nonprofit Websites
People are different. It’s one of the great truths about humanity that we are not all the same. And those differences end up determining how we live and act in so many ways. Including giving. That’s why there’s one particular webpage that should be on every nonprofit’s website. This page enables every single donor to give to your nonprofit in the way they most prefer.
And yet – at least 20% of nonprofit sites do not have this page.
That page is the ‘Ways to Give’ page.
14 Ways Donors Can Give to Your Nonprofit
As technology continues to change, the number of ways people can give to your nonprofit continues to grow. Consider this list of possible ways to give:
- Check
- Cash
- Credit card
- Debit card
- Direct deposit
- Phone
- Donor advised funds (DAFs)
- Planned giving (estate planning)
- In person
- Text to give
- Cryptocurrency
- By mail
- Online through your website
- Online through digital payment options like Paypal, Venmo
There are probably more.
And while most people aren’t beholden to a single method of giving, just about everyone who looks at that list would find methods of giving they refuse to use. Me personally? You won’t catch me giving with cryptocurrency… ever.
Enable Donors to Use Their Preferred Method of Giving
By putting a Ways to Give page on your website, you can spell out the details for as many methods of giving as you can possibly support.
You don’t want all this information on your online donation page.
For one, it clutters it up and will reduce online giving. Also, it just doesn’t belong there. Online giving IS a method of giving, but it’s only one way. Yes, you can fit a few ways to give on your online giving form such as credit cards and debit cards, but for people who want to give in other ways, they won’t want to scour through your online giving form to find that information.
So create a separate Ways to Give page, and put all that information there.
Ideally, you will add this page to your top navigation bar, perhaps as a dropdown menu item under your donation tab. You can decide the best place to put it for your nonprofit. But be sure you also link to it from your regular donation page so people looking for it there will easily find it.
What to Put on Your Ways to Give Page
As with everything online, the key is – make it easy.
Image by Jess Bailey from Pixabay
The simplest approach is to use a series of headings for each method of giving, with information on how to give using that approach, and links to supporting pages if necessary. Here are 9 examples of Ways to Give pages. Not all the examples on that site are good, in our opinion, but it gives you a good sampling of what’s possible.
As an example, if you want to provide the option to give using a Donor Advised Fund, the simplest process for doing this is to register your nonprofit with DAF Direct so you can install their giving widget on your site.
For Donor Advised Funds, the widget bypasses all the compliance steps associated with this form of giving. In other words – it makes it easy. Then, you can make direct appeals for DAF gifts. The average Donor Advised Fund has over $200,000 in it. And this is money that person has specifically marked for charitable donation. They WILL give it to someone. If you want that someone to be your nonprofit, then make it possible, and easy, for them to do so.
Click here for beginner’s guide to Donor Advised Funds
So on your Ways to Give Page, under the DAF section, you can point them to the widget and explain how to use it.
Do the same for your other more complicated methods of giving. For instance, your mailing address should be here. You should have an appeal for planned giving, with instructions on putting your nonprofit in a will or estate plan.
You should have a phone number. Instructions for setting up recurring giving through direct deposit. How to give with cryptocurrency if you want to play that game.
This is the page to spell all this out.
Yes, the page might get long. So what. No one is going to read this entire page. They’re going to find the sections explaining how to give using their preferred method. And that’s the only part you need them to read.
But if it isn’t there… they can’t read it.
Why Every Nonprofit Should Have a Ways to Give Page
One study found that at least 20% of nonprofits have no Ways to Give page. It’s probably higher than that though, because most of the nonprofits in that study were large or mid-size.
Image by meineresterampe from Pixabay
The reasoning here is simple.
People prefer to give using a variety of methods and for a variety of reasons. If you try to force everyone to give using the same method – online giving – you will reduce response, for the simple reason that some people refuse to give online.
Maybe they don’t trust inputting their information on any website. Maybe they don’t want you to have their card for some reason. Maybe they read about identity theft and are nervous about online transactions. Maybe they had their identity stolen. Maybe their company was the victim of a cyberattack. There are a million possible reasons why someone wouldn’t want to give online.
If that’s the only option you give them, they won’t give, and you lose money.
This is a one-time page that’s easy to put up. Once up, you can link to it from emails, other web pages, and social media posts. It is a permanent asset, and easily adaptable as your capabilities change.
If you have no Ways to Give page, put that on your to-do list for next month, and get it done!
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