Donation Page Optimization Basics

Jan. 12, 2011

Getting donations can be a tricky business and when it comes to donation pages for online giving you need to make sure they're optimized effectively or else you won't be successful. Your pages need to clearly explain why you are seeking donations, how you’re going to use them and what you’ve done with donations in the past. Having a easy-to-use, simple and concise donation page that clearly states the above ideas is essential for getting the contributions needed to keep your organization running smoothly.

What are you donors looking for on your website?

There are general standard pieces of information that donors expect to see when they arrive at a donation page. They want to be able to ascertain quickly and easily several things including your organization’s:

Mission and goals
Objectives
Past work and accomplishments
Use of donations

If these elements are missing from your online giving page you may be turning away some possible donors, after all, if someone can’t determine what you’re going to do with their money they are certainly going to be less likely to donate. The prospects arriving at your donor page are looking to be convinced about whether or not your cause is worthwhile.

What are the key elements of a strong donation page?

There are some specific key elements that are important to donation pages just like any other landing page. The aspects listed below can help to optimize your donation page for conversions (donations). Missing one, or several, of these elements can reduce the effectiveness of your page and can stop you from getting all the donations you can for you efforts. Like most landing pages, it’s important that your donation page features strong and compelling calls-to-action and obvious conversion buttons, but you also must include several other elements to help convince visitors that donating to your organization is the right thing to do. These aspects include:

An eye-catching heading or title to encourage donors to read further
Effective and relevant images can go a long way towards convincing visitors to donate
How you will use the donations
Your mission
A large prominent conversion button with a compelling call-to-action
A way to capture emails for future updates (you don’t want visitors to miss out on the opportunity to donate again in the future!)
Ways to share and spread (social media and sharing options are important for spreading the opportunity to donate to other possible donors).
A simple and easy-to-use donation functionality with a range of options for donating
A concise form
Trust elements. People don’t want to donate money to organizations they don’t trust. Including elements such as your organization’s privacy policy, a better business bureau link (if it applies to you) and other similar aspects help to instill trust in your visitors.

Testing and Improving

So now you’ve created your page and added the elements of strong donation pages, but your work isn’t done, in fact it’s only just begun. Just because you have all the necessary elements on your page it doesn’t mean that they are necessary optimized. Using A/B split and multivariate testing you can test different versions of your page, and individual elements themselves to help you determine what gives you the best results. Simply by moving a button, heading, call-to-action or link you might increase your conversion rate exponentially, but you’ll never know if you’re not continually testing. Some of the common aspects (and most important) to test are:

Page Headings. This is one of the first things that will grab your visitors’ attention, trying out different variations can help you to find the most compelling one.
Body Copy. While we suggest keeping your landing page copy to a minimum it’s important that the copy you do have is as effective as it can be.
Images. Depending on the purpose of your page, an image can be more effective than any copy. Try out different graphics to see which has the most powerful emotional connection for your donors.
Donation amounts and options. If you want to appeal to a wider audience you need to have flexible options. Have the ability to donate a one-time fee vs. a monthly fee, or trying out different minimum donation amounts can have an enormous effect on the type (and amount) of people that donate.
Forms. Nobody wants to fill out a long arduous form. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to donate so don’t bore them with long forms asking for information you don’t really need. Keep it short and sweet.
Calls-to-action. Your calls-to-action are what tell you visitors what you want them to do. If these aren’t effective as they can be, then you may be missing out on a large opportunity. Button size, color and location. Believe it or not, tiny details like the size, color and location of your conversion buttons can have an impact on the amount of people that will click on them. Make sure you test to see what your visitors find most eye-catching.

Obviously these aren’t the only elements of effective donation pages, and what works for one organization won’t necessarily work for another one. However these points are a good place to start and will hopefully help you get off on the right foot with your donation page optimization.

Have you found any other tactics or elements to be effective for your donation pages? Let us know!

Image by oneiroi on Flickr

Posted by Amberlie Denny at January 12, 2011 8:00 AM