According to M+R’s 2018 benchmark report, 83% of all donation page visitors leave without giving. There is a great opportunity for missionaries to drive donation conversion by rethinking their donation page strategy.
Should You Have One or Multiple Donation Pages?
Do you have one or multiple donation pages? Which is better?
From experience, to help drive significant donations, nonprofits need to have at least two donation pages.
- General donation page – this is your go-to donation page for general funds
- Campaign specific – individual campaigns
Why does this work?
This is now a common best practice across many leading nonprofits, for good reasons.
- Provides supporters to get involved in different ways
- You’ll drive more support for specific campaigns vs than a general donation page
- On campaign specific, you can experiment with specific content, a countdown clock, or gamify with progress bar
- You’ll have a main donation page that has lower friction points i.e. no need for additional drop down where to allocate donation to.
Make this one small change for drastic improvement
Sometimes the most significant improvements are from subtle but essential tweaks. Take an experiment conducted by NextAfter.com. By removing the links in the main navigation, including the Call-to-Action button to ‘donate,’they saw a 195% increase in a donation in their experiment.
Why does this work?
Someone who clicked to donate shouldn’t be confused by another “donate” button on the donation page, they’re already there. You only need your logo on the header of your donation page. Bonus tip: if your nonprofit website runs on WordPress, you can achieve this with the Conditional Menu plugin.
Experiment with the following key elements on your Donations Page
Using Unbounce or Google Optimizer, we encourage you to run ongoing experiments. Here are the key elements that could help give you a lift to your conversion:
- Your headline and subheading copy
- The main image on your donation page
- The intro copy (paragraph vs bullet points)
- Your copy length (long vs short)
- The elements of trust (% of your donation goes to the actual cause, any 3rd party verification body, testimonials)
- Showing the impact of various donation amounts, i.e. what does a $50 donation enable?
- Donation box – reduce number of field boxes, remove decision friction questions (see Tearfund)
