Online Donations Best Practices Review

A positive donor experience with an efficient, uncluttered donation process will help increase the number of donations you receive online.

To actually close a donation online it’s important that your website adheres to these 11 best practices.

1. Place a large, colorful donate button on every page.  Red has been tested and works.  More important is that the button color pops out from the site’s basic color scheme.

2. Clicking the donate button should take you directly to the donate form. “Donate Now” should never take me to a generic page about giving.

3. Stay focused – Offer one option to donate online. Never confront the donor who is ready to give with another menu asking them to choose membership vs annual fund vs capital campaign vs special event.

4. Provide limited donation page copy that emphasizes the mission is critical. They have already decided to give and don’t need to be sold yet again.

5. Avoid distractions. Remove detouring links from donation page. You don’t want the donor to go off and get side-tracked. Less is more.

6. Present a streamlined donation form that asks for the donation amount first and omits requests for optional (unnecessary) information.

7. Never ask for a telephone number, not even as optional.

8. Offer conservative preset gift amounts. (I like the $35 – $250 range, but it will vary according to your experience.) Donors who wish to give more will use the next tip.

9. Provide an “Other” amount option with a box where the donor can enter their own amount. Be sure there is enough room to see all the digits in the unlikely (but possible) event that they enter $10,000.

10. List 5 gift amounts horizontally.  People will often choose the second or third amount.

11. Give the donation form’s “Send” button an appropriate label, like “Make my gift NOW”.

No single one of these practices will make or break you. And certainly there are other web elements that are extremely important to the donation process (see Katya Andresen’s recent post on what must go on your home page). But the more you can observe these 11 practices, the more donations you will be likely to receive.

Facebook Causes Fundraising - Will it work for you?

Facebook's Causes page

Is using Facebook’s Causes application for fundraising worth the time and energy you might put into it?  You be the judge.

As of near the end of April 2009:

There were about 60 million members of Facebook in the USA (not all of them active).

25 million active members of Facebook had “joined” (not necessarily donated to) at least one Cause.

Less than 0.75% of those who have “joined” a cause have actually donated to a cause (185,000).

235,000 nonprofit organizations use the Causes application to try to raise money.

That’s an average of roughly 0.75 donors per cause.

Across all groups using Causes, almost $40,000 per day is currently raised (up from $3,000/day a year ago).

If that average (and all other numbers above) holds steady for a year it would mean $14.6 million in funds raised.  An average of $62.13 per nonprofit using Causes.

3 nonprofits had raised more than $100,000 using the Causes application.

88 (including the 3 above) had raised at least $10,000.

The question you should perhaps ask your organizational self is, “Are you sufficiently Web 2.0 savvy that you can do better than 99.967% of your competitors?”

Data source: Washington Post

Another Good Reason To Register Your Fundraising

All but unnoticed in the national press is an effort launched last week by the Federal Trade Commission and 49 Attorneys General — Operation False Charity. Federal and state enforcers announced 76 law enforcement actions against 32 fundraising companies, 22 non-profits or purported non-profits on whose behalf funds were solicited, and 31 individuals. 

Google news results for Operation False Charity and you’ll find state by state reports.