Online giving has been one of the most important game changers for nonprofits. With a good website, your organization has the opportunity to accept more donations in a short time than ever before.
It’s simple to receive gifts online. The trick is motivating people to give and follow through with the entire process.
55% of people worldwide prefer to give online. So it’s important that your website is optimized for them to easily do so. Think about how many potential donors visit your website every month. Do you know how many of them leave without making a donation? Your page conversion rate is the one metric that tells you exactly how many gifts are coming in through your website.
If you’re looking for more donors (aren’t we all?), keep reading for the best fundraising conversion rate optimization practices.
Table of Contents
- What is a conversion rate?
- Calculating Your Conversion Rate
- Best Practices to Optimize your Fundraising Conversion Rate
What is a conversion rate?
Your website’s rate of conversion tells you what percentage of website visitors typically make a donation (or take another desired action) during a given amount of time.
Some things your conversion rate doesn’t account for are how large those gifts are or how often individual donors are sending gifts. It’s about quantity of donations, not quality. (Although a donation of any size is a blessing!).
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
Here’s how to figure out your conversion rate: For a specific period of time, divide the number of people who made a donation through your landing page by the total number of visitors to that page. Multiply by 100 to get a clean percentage.
The formula looks like this: Number of donations / Total visitors x 100 = Rate of conversion
Best Practices to Optimize your Fundraising Conversion Rate
Okay, so now that you’ve calculated your conversion rate and know what it is– how do you improve it? We compiled the best practices to help you optimize your fundraising conversion rate.
Ultimately, the aim of fundraising conversion rate optimisation best practices is to reduce friction in your donation process. Make it as easy to give, in as few steps as possible.
Here are some tips to get you started:
1. Make Clear Calls to Action
Calls to action (CTAs) on fundraising pages are the directions that urge your visitors to do something. If you detail a problem without asking them to do something about it, then all you did was educate them about something. But they need to be told to engage! A few words can make a huge difference.
Most of the time, something simple like “Donate Now” or “Support [blank] Now” will do the trick. Experiment with CTAs that are concise, urgent, engaging, and interesting.
2. Streamline the Process
When you’re on the internet, do you always stay 100% focused on the task at hand, or is it easy to get distracted by all the different sites and content? If you are easily distracted online, you’re not alone! The more steps you have in your donation process, the more opportunities potential supporters have to get distracted or decide to give up and do something else. Reduce it to the smallest number of steps possible, while presenting other options like recurring monthly giving.
Streamlining your donation process is all about balancing enough options for how much, when, and how supporters would like to pay with simplicity and ease. The Soapbox Engage Donations app makes it incredibly simple for your donor to give quickly.
3. Design with the User in Mind
Successfully converting visitors to donors means convincing, compelling, or motivating them to make a financial gift.
Use all of your design tools and assets to create an experience that’s engaging, interactive, and emotional. Show potential supporters how their action will make a difference and make them feel like a partner. Use powerful visuals and impactful statistics and language to make your appeal, and then optimize your donation form for a fast, easy checkout.
4. Optimize for Mobile Giving
Did you know 28% of online contributions come from a mobile device? That is a very large segment of your donations! If your landing page doesn’t look its best on mobile devices, you might be missing out on a lot of fundraising revenue.
Make sure your website is responsive — which means it can change its dimensions based on the device a user is using to view it — so it loads quickly and looks good on any kind of device, especially smartphones.
The Soapbox Engage Donations app offers mobile-friendly designs to make sure you don’t miss out on this segment of revenue.
5. Offer a Variety of Payment Options
Every potential donor is different, and they will have different credit cards, bank accounts, and other payment methods they prefer. You’ll convert more people if you can accept at least one form of payment they use.
It’s a good idea to accept all major credit cards and test a few other options like PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other mobile wallets. If you can make it easy to opt in for regular giving, which is a rising trend that can have a major impact on your fundraising goals, make sure to include that option on your landing page!
6. Answer Donor Questions Up Front
Some donors will have a few questions, and they’ll poke around your website to find answers before they decide to donate. For example, they might want to know if a percentage of their donation goes to administrative costs or whether their payment information is secure. Don’t leave them hanging!
Find out what your potential donors want to know and make sure they have all the information they need to make their decision. There are plenty of places on your website to answer questions. The main things (who you are, your mission, and current campaign details) should be obvious on your homepage, and a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page is a great spot to put more mundane details like how your payment processor works.
7. Test Everything
Any time you adjust the donor journey, watch your conversion rate to make sure it stays the same or increases from the starting point.
Test things like your call to action or the shape and color of your donation button. Test everything on your landing page, from suggested donation amounts to content such as images and videos, and where different elements are placed.
Try testing different versions of your donation form and page for various audiences and platforms or tweak just one thing at a time. Here’s a list of elements you can test once you know your average conversion rate:
- Call to action wording
- Donation amounts
- Headline copy, images, and other design elements
- Ways to take action: donations, peer-to-peer campaigns, and event tickets
8. Link Your Donation Page
Once your donation form and page are set up and optimized, it’s time to get more traffic from high-converting sources. At the very least, make sure it’s linked on your social media profile pages or bios and in your staff’s email footers.
One of the most critical places to link your donation page is on your own website, particularly as a call to action on pages about your impact or in blog posts. Use Google Analytics to see which pages people are spending the most time on and make sure there’s an exciting call to action with a link to your donation form. Better yet, embed your donation form on your website in multiple places to avoid an additional click to a new page!
And there you have it! If you’re testing regularly like we suggested, you will likely be continuously tweaking your site to improve your conversion rate. But these tips are a great place to start!
Need more support to enhance your fundraising? Check out these resources:
- Introducing Soapbox Engage Donation Modals: Donations Modals are a new, straightforward way to collect gifts from your supporters. This blog post breaks down the features and how it can help.
- 4 Ways Donation Transparency Increases Fundraising Success: Whether they’re Gen X or Gen Z, it’s important that your donors are very clear about where their money is going! This blog post shares four ways donation transparency can make your fundraising more successful.
- Surefire Ways To Improve Your Nonprofit Storytelling: Great storytelling is essential to connecting with Gen Z. Whether you are communicating about your finances or updating supporters on your latest project, stories help communicate complicated information and help people connect personally. Here are some practical ways to become a better storyteller.
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