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Andrew Berry 11 min read

Marketing Your Online Donation Page: The Essentials

A nonprofit’s donation page is perhaps the most important element of its website, right? Without an optimized page and form for your donors to quickly and easily complete, your ability to accept and grow your online donations is severely limited.

Surprisingly, many nonprofits struggle with both creating a perfect online donation page and then promoting it to their donors.

Following some best practices will make promoting your page much easier. That’s because great donation pages become a seamless part of a nonprofit’s online operations.

Always remember these 5 key components when updating your organization’s donation page:

  1. Positive user experience
  2. Historic donor data
  3. Integration capabilities
  4. Email marketing tools
  5. Cross-campaign traffic

Keep these components in mind whenever you update your donation page. This will make it easier to promote your page across your marketing channels and generate more donor traffic!

1. Positive user experience

User experience, or UX design, has quickly become a guiding principle of web developers. Online visitors have less patience than ever with unoptimized, cluttered, confusing, and pushy websites.

This means that your donation page must prioritize positive user experience for your promotional efforts to ever pay off.

Always customize your donation page and form to contain only the fields that are completely necessary. Check out Donately’s customizable donation forms for some ideas on how to do this.

Keeping your donation page focused on the bare necessities will speed the donation process, making it more likely for users to complete a donation and come back to give again.


2. Historic donor data

Use your donor information database to make some assumptions about what your new and returning donors will want on your donation page.

For instance, if you offer preconfigured donation amounts to choose from, how much do your online donors typically donate? If they’ve provided contact information, what channels of communication do they prefer?

Learning from your data is a great way to boost donor retention!

Plus, you should always ask for feedback and additional information after the donation process is complete. Then use this data to better guide your donation page marketing strategies.


3. Integration capabilities

To get the most possible use out of your donation page, it’s important that your donation software integrate with apps that are central to your digital operations. This will streamline your marketing efforts by simplifying reporting and messaging tasks.

For example, the information you receive through your optimized donation page could:

  • Automatically create and send receipts
  • Add donor information to your CRM immediately
  • Feature donation links and tools in your automated emails

By integrating your donation page software with other apps, you can drastically simplify your overall marketing process, using the data from both your donation page and other fundraising campaigns to market and improve each other.

4. Email marketing tools

Your email campaigns are the perfect place to promote your optimized donation page.

Link to your donation page no matter what the exact purpose of your email is. Include the link in your formatted newsletters and in the body of your personalized appeal emails!

To maximize the effectiveness of these messages, look for some email-specific marketing tools.

For example, you can find Double the Donation matching gift database search tools or campaign progress trackers to embed in your email messages. Providing intuitive tools is the best way to engage recipients and increase the clickthrough rate to your donation page.

5. Cross-campaign traffic.

Think of all the different ways to raise funds online these days.Your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign or crowdfunding platform might offer internal donation options, but it’s still essential to fully customize your campaign pages and follow some best practices for marketing your campaigns.

Take the opportunity to direct your email recipients to your optimized donation page!

On any of your campaign pages or marketing channels, you should include clearly labeled links to your homepage, donation page, and other important content that tells your story. Encourage some social media sharing to generate more traffic!

By linking all of your ongoing fundraising campaigns, you can increase exposure and traffic to your donation page.

Remember, if your donation page is difficult to complete, confusing, or isolated from your other data and campaigns, it won’t matter how heavily you promote it to your donors.

The core components of an optimized and effective online donation page are essential to generating meaningful engagement and growing your online donation revenue!

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This post was guest authored by Donate.ly. Donate.ly offers a suite of online donation software solutions to nonprofits to help them with their fundraising efforts and donor engagement.

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Andrew Berry

Andrew is the head of marketing and customer success for Donately. After getting involved with nonprofits at a young age, he discovered a passion for helping the organizations that are making the world a better place. Knowing how vital online fundraising has become, his goal is to help nonprofits raise more money online each year! In his spare time, you will find him cooking up dinner, playing with his dog or cheering on Boston sports teams.

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