By Christina Hoey, Director of Client Success NZ, HomeMade Digital
One stat that popped out at me in this year’s Benchmarking Project presentation is that online average gifts are lower than those from Direct Mail. Why is that? The simple answer is that we’re not asking people for the right amount of money. And since we know that in 79% of Single Giving income comes from warm donors[1], it’s critical to be asking your current supporters for the right amount to ensure that you’re not driving them away with too high or too low ask arrays.
Hello and welcome to my TED talk – a Big Thing I wish I’d understood better when I was a Fundraising Director.
If you’re putting out great marketing campaigns that are grabbing the hearts of people and they click through with the intention to give to you, you want to be sure that you’re serving up a frictionless donation experience that isn’t losing potential donors along the way.
Direct Mail specialists put a lot of time and energy into testing and perfecting donation coupons in their appeal packs and asking people for donations at the relevant level to their usual giving – why wouldn’t we do the same for our online donors? And as the acquisition channel mix swings more in favour of online, you want to be sure you’re getting it right.
We mystery shopped the NZ charities who are members of the Benchmarking Project and found that only 3 out of the 14 donation experiences tested were truly optimised. The rest are simply leaving money on the table by asking for too many data points or confusing and unintuitive design.
Over the last decade, online shoppers have essentially been ‘trained’ via slick checkout processes on what’s expected from them and what they need to do to get that dopamine hit of buying something online. Donation pages are not exempt – if users’ needs or expectations are not met, they will abandon cart so to speak, and you will have lost a donor.
And while yes, websites are pretty fixed things and can require mysterious things like coding, here are three things you can do NOW to increase your online average gift, for both single and regular giving.
1. Strip out the top navigation bars on your donation page
This is the single most important thing you can do to optimize your donation page – get rid of all the ways a user can leave the donation page once they’ve landed there. I’m talking about navigation bars, drop-down menus, hamburger menus, everything. The only ‘escape route’ you want to allow at the top is a link back to your homepage on the logo.
2. Optimise your donation array
You know that quote about giving people too many choices causes them to not choose at all? That is especially true for donation pages. We’ve tested and optimised many different charity donation pages across New Zealand, Australia and the UK and found that for most appeals an array of 3 amounts performs best. It provides choice, while not being too confusing. For appeals with significant cold traffic, or capital appeals seeking a wide range of contributions, you may find an array of five amounts performs better.
The amounts you offer also matter. If your lowest option is $25, then you’re going to get an average gift of $25. Conversely, if the lowest amount you offer on your single giving form is something high like $75, you’re telling people that anything less than that isn’t worth it to you.
If you’re worried about ‘turning people off’ by not offering lower amounts like $10 or $20, then ensure you have conversion tracking set up properly in Google Analytics to monitor your conversion rates for warm and cold traffic.
3. Have different donation pages for warm and cold audiences
Your always-on donation page that sits on your homepage is generally for cold audiences – people new to you that you haven’t directly solicited.
Meanwhile, you’re probably emailing your warm database when you run appeals. The donation page you send them to should (a) reflect the appeal proposition both visually and in the copy and (b) offer donation amounts that are relevant to your warm audience. For example, if your average gift for your appeals is $80, then consider anchoring the middle of your donation array on $80.
If you want to take it one step further, you could use PURLs (personalised URL, not the knitting stitch!) to send each donor a personalised donation page with the same amounts you’re asking for in their DM pack.
And here’s a bonus tip, but it could need a bit of investment – make sure your donation page is optimised for mobile. Why? The majority of online donations are coming from mobile phones these days. So ,while us charity folk usually view donation pages and websites on our work computers, our supporters are seeing them when they’re on the train home from work or checking their phones while they’re out.
You can test it on your desktop – just reduce the size of your window until it’s narrow. Then have a look at how the different components have rearranged themselves or even disappeared. Does anything render wonky? Weird-looking components will put people off and cause them to question the legitimacy of your mobile site.
Does it flow logically and easily? Are you asking users to swipe just in one direction, or are you asking them to do left / right as well as down? Anything that doesn’t flow easily and logically will make users lose the will to complete the process, no matter their generous intentions.
Don’t make donating hard! Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
If you’d like to discuss further, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Christina at: christina@homemadedigital.com
[1] Slide 66, Aotearoa New Zealand Essentials Report 2024