10 Tips To Improve Your Nonprofit Donation Page

You’re driving lots of traffic to your donation page (especially if you’ve followed our tips) but if the page itself effective your efforts will be wasted and you’ll be losing out on donations.

Your donation page doesn’t need anything fancy, a simple page, that works well, is best.  Keep distractions to a minimum and make the process easy to understand and your donors will thank you for it! This will ensure that you don’t lose any potential donors at the last step, and they aren’t put off of donating again.

In this post, we give you our 10 top tips for a simple and effective donation page, that will help make sure your supporters donate.

12. Keep to one webpage

There are benefits to both having several small steps for donors to follow, or one longer form. Whichever one you choose however, it needs to be on one webpage.

The extra effort required in pressing onto each new page may put some people off. Also, it isn’t immediately clear to potential donors what information is going to be required of them to make a donation and this may mean they expect it will be a lot and leave the page.

If you’re choosing the several smaller steps option, make sure you display a progress bar so donors know how long the process will take and what will be expected of them at each step.

11. Remove distractions

While we are discussing how to drive traffic to your donation page, it’s also important to keep them on it when they get there. Once a supporter enters the donation process, there should be no temptation to divert elsewhere on your website (or off it!)

Consider removing the navigation bar from the head of the page while they fill out their details, and ensure you don’t have any ads on the page at all.

Any potential distractions will result in you losing donations. They can always browse your website some more once they’ve donated!

10.  Have a fast load time

40% of user say they abandon a site if it hasn’t loaded in 3 seconds, so if your page is slow you could be losing out on 40% of potential donations!

You can improve your load time by upgrading to a fast web host, minimising styles, such as animations, and image size, and by doing away with redirects. For international donors, speed up their load time by using a CDN that distributes your content to servers closer to the website visitor.

If you would like some more advice on getting your website working well, book a free consultation with Twenti!

9. Include option to receive gift aid

This tip doesn’t necessarily make the donation process easier for donors, but it is an easy way for your nonprofit to gain more donations and for donors to make more of a difference.

Gift aid lets nonprofits claim 25p from HMRC per pound on donations made by UK taxpayers. All donors need to do to allow your nonprofit to receive gift aid is to provide basic contact details and confirm they are a UK taxpayer and want your nonprofit to claim some of it back.

For more information check out the governments page on gift aid. UK nonprofits gain £1.1 billion a year in gift aid, don’t miss out on your share.

8. No sign up or login required

Requiring donors to sign up or login is an extra step that may put them off. It takes more time, makes the process more complicated and implies commitment for those who are only wanting to make a one-time donation.

Maintain contact with donors by giving them the option to receive your emails, not by forcing them to make an account.

7. Ask for as little information as possible

Don’t force donors to give you more information than they are comfortable with, or make them fiddle with extra fields that waste time. With increasing numbers of users donating via mobile devices reducing the information they need to enter is especially important. 

Do away with an email confirmation and title fields, and make sure giving a phone number is an optional field, not compulsory.

6. Use suggested donation amounts

Make things simple for supporters.

Suggested donation amounts mean they don’t have to worry about deciding what is appropriate to donate, you get to tell them what will help you.

As long as you have a range of options within each price range, they’ll be able to select the one right for them.

One study found providing suggested donation amounts increased average donation amounts by 12%! It streamlines the process for the donor and helps you raise more!

5. Include a brief why

While distractions should be kept to a minimum, a brief mission statement needs to be included to give that extra bit of encouragement and remind supporters why they are donating.

This can be done using graphics/counters that show the overall impact your nonprofit has made, for example, a counter of total trees planted.

One effective way of getting this information across is including brief examples of what each amount of money donated can be used for. This helps supporters decide how much to donate, and lets them know the direct impact their money will be making.

WWF shows how this can be done effectively.