Giving Page Not Driving Conversions? 5 Improvements to Make

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When it comes to the essential features of your nonprofit’s website, your ability to collect online donations is number one.

Donately’s guide to online fundraising states that “with so many people spending so much time online, virtual fundraising is the most efficient and effective way for nonprofits to directly reach and engage their target audiences.”

So, what if your organization’s online giving page isn’t having the expected impact and raising donations effectively? That means it’s time to make a few changes to both your website overall and your donation form itself.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the following five improvements that you can make to improve your giving page conversions:

• Ensure there’s a clear route to your giving page.
• Incorporate suggested giving options.
• Simplify your online donation form.
• Accept multiple payment options.
• Embed the form directly on your nonprofit’s website.

Improving your giving page conversion rate involves both website design updates and your online donation tool. With that in mind, the following sections will discuss changes you can make to both elements.

Let’s get started!

Ensure there’s a clear route to your giving page.

Donors can’t give through your donation page if they’re not able to find it to begin with.

Consider updating your website to make it easy for supporters to find this important page. Specifically, you should add call-to-action (CTA) links across your site to function as a roadmap leading supporters to the page.

You probably include a link to the page from your website’s main navigation menu. In addition to that, add the following CTAs:

• Eye-catching, colorful buttons on each page
• In-line text CTA links wherever making donations are mentioned
• Links in the running footer at the bottom of the page

Donors may be inspired to give from any page on your website. The goal should be to clearly outline the next action— navigating to your giving page— when that happens.

Incorporate suggested giving options.

Getting donors to land on your online giving page is only step one. Once they arrive on the page, your goal should be to make the online giving process as frictionless as possible with a few edits to the form itself.

The easier you can make it for donors to complete the giving process, the more likely they will be to actually do so rather than abandoning their gift in the checkout step.

One way to do this is to incorporate suggested giving options, which can eliminate any decision paralysis and subtly encourage donors to give in greater amounts. Rather than donors having to decide how much to give on their own, they can simply click a button that’s closest to (and perhaps, slightly higher) than the amount that they would have given.

Incorporate the following two giving suggestions:

• Recurring gifts. Donors who make recurring monthly donations, even if those donations are smaller than one-time gifts, will give more over their lifetime than those who make one larger gift. Offer the option for donors to upgrade their gift into a monthly donation and increase their impact.
• Suggested amounts. Consider the average size of your organization’s online donation. Then, suggest three gift sizes that guests can choose from — one slightly lower than this donation amount, one slightly higher, and one a decent amount higher. For example, if your average donation is $25, offer suggestions of $20, $30, and $55.

You should still include a box through which guests can write in their preferred giving amount if the suggestions don’t align with what they had in mind. 

Your ability to make these customizations will largely depend on the online fundraising software you’re using. According to re:Charity’s guide to the top nonprofit fundraising software options, many solutions allow for full donation page customization, including the ability to incorporate all of the tips in this guide. If your current solution doesn’t allow for these types of changes, it’s worthwhile to consider investing in a new resource to increase your donation page conversion rate.

Simplify your online donation form.

In addition to offering suggested giving ideas, further simplify your online donation form to ensure site visitors aren’t deterred during the checkout process.

For example, your fundraising software should allow you to simplify your giving page with the following strategies:

• Making the form accessible to all viewers. For example, it should be tab-friendly so donors navigating via a keyboard can easily click through the tabs. Additionally, there should be directions corresponding to each form field, ensuring guests know what information the form is asking for. This ensures that all donors can use the form regardless of any visual or auditory disabilities.
• Only ask for the information you need. Your giving form is one opportunity to collect valuable information about donors, so it’s understandable if you want to ask for as much information as possible. However, every form field that you ask donors to fill out can slow them down and increase the risk that they don’t complete the giving process. Limit the information that you ask for and if you ask for any nice-to-know details, avoid making those fields required. That way, busy donors can skip on filling out the fields that aren’t necessarily crucial for the giving process.

With these updates, not only will all supporters be able to complete the giving process, but it should be quick and easy for them to do so.

Accept multiple payment options.

There are numerous ways to make a payment online, and your donors likely have a wide range of payment preferences.

Oftentimes, donors will only complete the giving process if they can do so via the tender they prefer, so you must offer all of the popular options on your website.

This includes:

• All major credit and debit cards
• Google Pay
• Apple Pay
• ACH direct deposit
• eCheck

It’s important to note that this isn’t a change that your team will be able to make itself; rather, it will depend on your online fundraising software and the payment processor it uses. With that in mind, implementing this update will require choosing the right fundraising software. If your solution doesn’t offer a wide variety of payment options, consider investing in a new one.

Embed the form directly on your nonprofit’s website.

Last but certainly not least, you should ensure that your donation form is directly embedded on your giving page.

Some fundraising software solutions will open up a donation form in a third-party website outside of your organization’s site. This can be an online donation red flag for supporters, especially since the third-party page won’t be branded to your organization itself.

When your donation form is directly embedded on your website, donors will trust that the donations they make through it will actually go to your organization. This trust is integral to encouraging donors to complete the giving process.

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Each of these updates will help site visitors more effectively find your giving page and proceed through the donation process. The more seamless you make that process, the more likely donors will be to complete it and make a gift to your organization!

One final tip: consider ways that you can continue optimizing the process after a gift is made. For example, you could invest in matching gift software to give donors the ability to search their gift match eligibility. Eligible donors could contribute double, triple, or quadruple the donation for the work of soliciting only the first gift!

These tips will set you up for a strong start when optimizing your giving page to increase conversions and raise more. Good luck!