GUEST POST // Donation Page Optimization: Best Practices and Design Tips
By Murad Bushnaq of Morweb
Your donation page plays an important role in how successful your nonprofit is with online fundraising. This page is more than just a form for donors to input their financial information into. An optimized donation page can effectively increase donations, while one that’s visually overwhelming or difficult to complete can turn donors away.
Whether you’re setting up your nonprofit’s donation page for the first time or looking to revamp your current page to improve completion rates, your donation page can always be improved to maximize each supporter’s visit. Supporters who reach your donation page are likely already familiar with your nonprofit and are at a critical point in their engagement. Make the most of their attention to turn one-time donations into the beginning of long-lasting relationships.
Take a look at some of the best nonprofit websites, and determine what design principles they follow. By doing so, you'll find that you likely won't need to overhaul your entire website, but rather, you'll only need to make some tweaks to boost conversions. To help you get started, we’ll explore these seven best practices and design tips for creating and maintaining a donation page:
Avoid Asking Unnecessary Questions
Offer Recurring Donation Opportunities
Include Matching Gift Opportunities
Optimize for Mobile Devices
Brand It to Your Nonprofit
Ensure Your Donation Page is Accessible
Take Extra Security Precautions
Many of these practices can be implemented with minimal understanding of the technology behind your donation page. However, if you do run into a technical issue, don’t be afraid to reach out to your website provider’s support team for assistance. After all, your donation page is the primary reason you can fundraise online and is worth every effort to optimize.
1. Avoid Asking Unnecessary Questions
The information in your nonprofit database is vital to understanding and communicating with your supporters. When supporters fill out forms on your website, they willingly share information to deepen their involvement. This means that it can be tempting to ask as many questions as possible on your donation form, but doing so can turn donors away.
Donation forms that are too long can lead to donation abandonment where donors exit the page before completing their contribution. You can convince donors to see their form through to the end by:
Keeping the form to a single page. When donors have to fill out more than a page’s worth of information, giving can become overwhelming.
Asking only relevant questions. With each additional field, donors have another opportunity to abandon their gifts. Stick to requesting the essentials, including the donor’s name, contact information, and payment details.
Minimizing data re-entry. Don’t make donors provide the same information more than once. This can quickly become frustrating, prompting them to exit the page.
Once a supporter submits their donation, you’ll immediately receive important information about them so that you can stay connected. After they’ve given, you can then prompt supporters to provide more information or sign up for further engagement opportunities such as subscribing to your newsletter.
2. Offer Recurring Donation Opportunities
Recurring donations provide a stream of revenue that your nonprofit can rely on month after month. By prioritizing donor retention, you can effectively encourage them to stay with your organization over long periods of time, which helps you solidify a donor base of committed individuals who you can continually engage with and seek support from.
Compared to retaining donors, acquiring new donors is an expensive, lengthy process. This means you should make the most of when new supporters decide to make their first contribution.
Using your donation form, you can encourage donors to consider becoming recurring donors by:
Including a recurring donation checkbox or button on your donation page.
Prompting supporters to become recurring donors after making their donation.
Offering suggested recurring gift amounts.
Once someone becomes a recurring donor, make sure to maintain their status by checking in with them when any of their information changes and by following up if a payment fails. Many nonprofits let recurring donors lapse by never reaching out to them after a payment falls through, even when it’s likely their feelings about donating haven’t changed.
3. Include Matching Gift Opportunities
Your donors may be able to give more than they first assumed. When supporters who work for companies with matching gift programs donate, they can then request that their employer also donate to your nonprofit. Companies that offer these programs have different procedures, but many will match employees’ donations on a dollar-for-dollar basis.
Matching gifts don’t just increase the amount of each donation from eligible donors that come in. According to Double the Donation’s guide to matching gift databases, 84% of donors say they’re more likely to donate if they qualify for a matching gift.
This means your nonprofit can drive extra donations by including a matching gift search tool on your donation page and reaching out to potential donors who might be match-eligible.
Gift matching eligibility requirements and amounts vary based on employer, so it’s normal to have questions about matching gifts before investing in a database that houses information on companies’ programs. You can reach out to providers to try demos before committing to a purchase to get some of your questions answered ahead of time. That way, you’ll be fully prepared to guide donors through the process when the time comes.
4. Optimize for Mobile Devices
While many of your supporters will fill out your donation form on their computers, phones are an equally popular device for browsing the web. This means that pages that aren’t mobile friendly can turn away a large portion of potential donors.
Along with the rest of your organization’s website, make sure you design your donation form with mobile users in mind. Here are a few steps you can take to prioritize the mobile experience and subsequently increase donations:
Improve page speed. Slow load times will deter visitors, especially those on mobile devices. To improve load time, you should compress images, remove excess coding, limit redirects, and leverage browser caching.
Simplify the page. Minimize the number of elements on the page, like images and extra fields. Not only will this help avoid any formatting issues across various devices, but it also can improve the page’s speed and eliminate distractions.
Today’s nonprofit technology makes it easy to design your giving page for mobile users. Make sure your website builder offers automatic mobile responsiveness, so you don’t have to build multiple versions of your site for different devices. The page’s elements will automatically resize to fit the user’s screen size, ensuring your donation form is fully functional and that visitors can easily submit their contributions. Then, implement the above tips to optimize the mobile experience further.
If a prospective donor is forced to wait until they have access to a computer, they may forget to give altogether. Taking these extra steps will optimize the mobile experience and ensure you’re maximizing your revenue.
5. Brand It to Your Nonprofit
If donors feel as though they’ve somehow navigated away from your nonprofit’s website to donate, they likely won’t feel secure about sharing their financial information. Fortunately, you can ease their fears and create a consistent donation experience by including branded elements from your website on your donation page.
Morweb’s guide to donation page design explains how branding can help build trust with your donors. Here are a few key recommendations ensure your giving page is clearly tied to your cause:
Customize your template. Before investing in a donation page creation tool, ensure it comes with customizable templates that allow you to change the color of design elements to match your nonprofit’s colors.
Display your logo. Your logo represents your nonprofit and assures donors that they’re giving to your organization when they press submit. Place your logo on every page of your website and make sure your donation page is no exception.
Style donation buttons. Similar to customizing your template, alter the color of your donation button to match your nonprofit’s brand and stand out against the page’s background. Try changing the wording on your submit button to create a friendly, more engaging experience. For example, while “Submit” works perfectly well, “Send Your Donation,” “Donate Now,” or other phrases that fit your nonprofit’s brand can add to the donation experience.
Make sure that the background color of your donation page contrasts with key colors of your logo and other brand colors. Brand visibility can help instill further brand recognition in donors, but shouldn’t come at the cost of a functional donation page.
6. Ensure Your Donation Page is Accessible
In its current state, your donation page may not be fully accessible to everyone who wants to make a contribution. Visitors who use screen readers and other assistive technology appreciate the inclusion of basic web design principles for better accessibility such as alternative text for images, readable fonts, and clear labels to help them navigate your website and understand its content.
Donation pages can often be a stumbling block for accessible design as not all fundraising software comes with donation tools that are optimized for accessibility. When adjusting your donation page’s design, make sure to:
Use visuals other than color to indicate a required field. Colorblind visitors can have difficulty discerning colors on certain background colors, especially if there is low contrast. You can avoid this problem altogether by using another visual element such as an asterisk to mark necessary information fields.
Include descriptive text outside of the information fields. Text that appears inside of an information field and then disappears when clicked can be useful when a visitor first opens your page. However, filling out the form can become increasingly difficult if all of the descriptive text instructing them what information to enter disappears as soon as they start typing. Include additional labels for each information field on the page itself.
Accessible design is generally a good practice, as it impacts your entire audience. These changes tend to make your donation page easier to use for all of your donors by creating a smoother, more navigable donation experience.
7. Take Extra Security Precautions
If it isn’t already, make security one of your top priorities. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities put your donors’ data at risk, and a security breach can permanently damage their trust in your nonprofit.
You can keep your donors’ financial information safe by ensuring your payment processing tools are PCI-compliant. PCI-compliant software follows certain online security guidelines put forth by the Payment Card Industry (PCI). If you have any questions about your payment processing software’s security practices, don’t hesitate to ask your provider.
In addition, you can perform regular maintenance yourself by routinely filling out and submitting your donation form during maintenance checks. This lets you test every field and ensure that it’s synced to your donor database.
Be sure to install any updates to your software and website hosting service if you use an open-source CMS, as well. Many of these updates are created to combat security vulnerabilities, and being slow to install an update can put your financial information at risk.
The Gist
Your donation page should add to your donors’ experience of making positive change, not serve as an additional obstacle to creating an impact. You can improve your donation page by respecting your donors’ time and creating an easy-to-use, convenient form. Once you’ve built your donation form, be sure to include it in your website maintenance so it never disrupts your supporters’ ability to give. Ultimately, our donors and your team will appreciate the power of an optimized online giving process.
This guest post was written by Murad Bushnaq.
Murad Bushnaq is the Founder and CEO of Morweb. Since its inception in 2014, Murad has acted as Creative Director and Chief Technologist to help nonprofits spread their vision online through engaging design, intuitive software and strategic communication.
