Heather Ballachey

Date: October 7, 2014

Name: Small Changes for Big Result: How to optimize your online donations

Presenter: Heather Ballachey

NetSquared Vancouver is a global movement supported by TechSoup. NetSquared presents Heather Ballachey, the Marketing Communication Specialist from IATS Payments. In this presentation, she will share the techniques to optimize online donation. In addition, not for profit organizations will benefit from this presentation and will learn more effective ways to improve online fundraising.

The drive of traffic to the organization website and online donation form

Ballachey believes the source of all nonprofit organizations’ traffic are categorized to events, social media, face to face, email, television, and direct mail. The source is important for nonprofit organizations because 85% of all donors donate online and 73% of them are on social media. The dominant channel for new donors is from online. They usually have high cumulative value because online donors tend to give larger contribution.

The average abandonment rate of online donation form in all nonprofit organization is around 50 – 70%. Ballachey suggests 3 ways to reduce the abandonment rate.

The first way is to avoid third party redirect. A majority of donors abandon when they are redirected to another site. It is important to keep donors in the current site and focus on continuity of look and feel.

Another way is to offer a compelling call to action. Nonprofit organizations need to show donors the reason why they need to donate and incite them to take action right away. It is also important to make the personal connection as well.

The last way is to eliminate unnecessary fields on the donation form. By reduce the redundant fields, donors will not overwhelm with entering the information. This will help donors to complete the donation right away.

Donation form is buried on organization’s site

Ballachey believes many nonprofit organizations’ online form is not visible in their websites. Donors are not able find the link and they will reject to donate. It is important for nonprofit organizations to direct donors to find the link instantly. In addition, it will help increase the conversation rate from visitors to donors.

Ballachey suggests all online donation forms should be front and center of the main website. Donation form should be easy to read with obvious language. Provide multiple access points in the navigation for visitors to click and find.

Donation forms should be mobile friendly

In average, only 20% of nonprofit organizations convert their online donation forms to mobile friendly application. Since most of the donors are online donors, nonprofit organizations should make their forms compatible to their needs. Ballachey suggests the solution of invest in response design. This will create a landing page for donors to donate and automatize the donation process.

How to encourage recurring gifts

If donors are encouraged to donate recurring contribution, nonprofit organizations will have sustainable funding. This will also reduce the cost for handing donations. A majority of donors are unlikely to cancel the recurring gift when they are committed to it. Therefore, it is important to keep them inspired.

Ballachey suggests the best way to create recurring donation is to ask them upfront. Ballachey do not recommend separating the one time gift form and recurring gift form. It is important to make the process easy and intuitive. Split the form only if the donor list gets long and massive.

Other consideration from Ballachey to improve the online donation form is to systematize the payment processing integration. Security is an issue for donors.

Another consideration is to set up automated clearing house (ACH) or direct debit as payment method. This will reduce the chance of rejected transactions.

Other factor that might lead to low online donation is the visual representation of security. Donors are afraid of credit card fraud; therefore, nonprofit organizations need to optimize payment prevention strategy to avoid the refund scam.

To optimize your online donations, nonprofit organizations need to ensure these six points are met.

• Call to action
• Simple form
• No redirect
• Make it obvious
• Device responsive
• Recurring gifts and security