How to boost donations by creating user friendly donation features
The lifeblood of the vast majority of charities and non-profit organisations are donations from their supporters. As such, making the process of donating as simple and user friendly as possible is both one of the biggest priorities and challenges. We’d like to offer some creative ways to help you make improvements to your donation features or even build new donation features.
TLDR: To increase donations from your audience, it’s imperative to ensure your donation features are as user friendly as possible – here are a few ways to do so.
What are donation features?
Donation features are systems by which charities and non-profits can facilitate taking in donations from their audiences, be that monetary or otherwise. They can be analog or digital, and can also be based on your own platform (e.g. app or website) or provided externally as a service (e.g. Just Giving, GoFundMe).
Having robust, easily navigable donation systems will improve your chances at receiving donations no end. A well built donation feature provides trust with your users, offering peace of mind that their money will be treated securely, and having as economical a journey as you can will increase the likelihood they will make it through to completing the transaction. Some examples of charity websites with good donation features include Breast Cancer Now, WWF and Charity: Water.
How can you better employ donation features to increase your donations?
There are a number of factors that will inform some of the decisions you make in choosing the right donation feature. These will include whether they’re one-off or recurrent givers, whether it’s a charitable donation or funding gathering exercise, how those giving are required to participate (e.g. if they’re just providing a monetary donation or actively fundraising on the organisation’s behalf), what method the user journey takes as part of the ‘marketing funnel’ [Wild Apricot Non-Profit marketing funnel], for example: if they’ve come directly to the website or funding page, or if they’ve arrived on your site via social media.
You can make use of tools that allow you to track any drop off points in the donation process. Hotjar is a website heatmap and analytics tool that shows a number of useful metrics, such as where users are drawn to on a page (via the heatmap), and information about users, such as their browser types and some demographic information (via the analytics features).
We’ve provided some more high level suggestions on making your donation features and processes the best they can be below:
Creating a clear and concise user experience
When onboarding your audience in the donation process, it’s imperative that the user journey is as straightforward as it can be to facilitate their giving. Therefore, there shouldn’t be any unnecessary or overcomplicated steps that could trip them up as they move through it. We recommend testing the process yourselves, and performing some user testing with members of your intended audience(s), to determine where any sticking points are and see where the journey can be made easier. If you’re unable to simplify your donation journey any more – and/or it’s still fairly long – it’s worth having a progress bar so people can see how much further they have to go to reach completion.
If you’re implementing a third-party tool to facilitate your donation mechanism, you should ensure the experience stays within your website. Not only does this build trust with your users, if you don’t have it within your ecosystem, it can disrupt the user experience and make it longer. You also can’t track where users get to in their journey, if it takes place on an external platform.
Another aspect of creating a reliable and enjoyable experience for your audience is to enable its functionality across all devices: this means it must work seamlessly on both desktop machines/laptops and handheld devices (e.g. mobiles or tablets). It’s also really important that the process is accessible to all, adhering to accessibility best practices.
Providing flexibility for your audience when donating
People like options. They make them feel more like they’re in control – this is particularly true when it comes to money. To maximise the amount of donations you receive, you want to make it as flexible a process as possible: it’s certainly not a one size fits all situation, and the easier you can make donating, the more people are likely to do so.
You can do this through a number of means (and we would recommend employing them all, if you can):
- Set up some preset amounts that people can select when choosing to donate (e.g. £10, £20, £50, £100 etc). However, don’t forget to also have a custom field where people can enter an amount, as not having this option can put people off altogether.
- Make sure to provide a wide range of payment methods (e.g. credit/debit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal) – this will make donating accessible to all users, and some of these services even make the transaction process go faster.
- Have the option to donate once or on a recurring basis – this makes things simpler for those that wish to do so regularly.
Demonstrating the impact donations have on your organisation
In your content, creating a sense of urgency can be an impactful way to drive donations over a short space of time. This could be through starting a countdown for a specific campaign or or highlighting how close you are to hitting a fundraising target. You could also offer ‘money-buys’: a way of donating a specific amount towards ‘buying’ an item/service for one of your service users, for example: £40 will give a family X amount of seed to plant and feed themselves for 6 months. This creates a tangible fundraising goal that demonstrates what your audiences’ hard earned money is used for.
Bringing your audiences along for the ride
In order to get audiences on board with your cause, you need to connect with them in some way. Bring them along for the ride by telling your organisation’s story: Who do you support? What work do you do to help these intended people/groups? What impact has your work had on those you support? Why did you start in the first place?
If you can answer these questions and present them in an engaging way – i.e. with user stories, imagery and video, stats, graphs (see our recent post on Data Visualisations for more on these) and impact reports – you can bring the stories of those you’re supporting to life. This is going to allow your audiences to empathise with your organisation’s endeavours and will spur them on to help.
To help people take more ownership over their fundraising, you can offer the ability to make the donation in memory of a loved one or close friend, even adding a note to allowing them to express the reason why they’re donating. Creating an emotional connection with giving in this way has been proven to increase the amount users are willing to donate to the cause. Without being exploitative, you can make use of any opportunity to help people to feel connected to your cause. It’s not out of the question to ask users to also cover the transaction fee, so that you as a charitable organisation can put their money towards your actual work, rather than having to spend it on admin fees.
How can we help
We’ve built many donation features for both charities and non-profits. Our expertise in this area has benefitted our clients immensely with the donations they receive via their new or improved systems for taking donations. If you’re looking to either create a new donation feature or make improvements to your existing ones, why not arrange a call with us to discuss how we can be of assistance?
In our upcoming blog post, we’re going to dive into a bit more detail about the different technologies we use to create new donation features on our clients’ websites. Have you signed up to our twice monthly Bureau for Good newsletter yet? If not, do so now and you’ll be the first to hear when that post goes live, along with other useful articles and links we like to share.
