Ways to Improve Charity Website Donor Page
11 August 2008 at 3:29 pm
While email and web copy may persuade people to "click to donate now," very few who land on the donation page actually complete the donation transaction, according to US experts.
In partnership with Donordigital, Amnesty International USA embarked on a project aimed at improving donation page ‘conversions’ hoping to increase the total dollars raised.
Nick Allen, from Donordigital says the Not for Profit website may educate and motivate supporters, but its main purpose is probably to encourage them to take action– send a message to government, attend an event, download a report, buy a t-shirt, or donate all their Google stock!
Allen says optimizing Web pages, especially the ones where organisations want people to take an action, can dramatically improve the conversation rates, persuading more visitors to actually take the action they want them to take.
He says what seem like very small changes on a page can sometimes make a huge difference.
For example, during the research when they removed just the title (Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc.) and suffix (Jr., M.D.) fields from Amnesty International’s donation page, conversion to donations improved 30%!
They also found that:
– Bigger donate buttons helped convert more donors
– Vividly coloured donation buttons had varying levels of impact on donation page conversion
– Removing unnecessary fields from personal information forms significantly increased conversion
– Polite header copy yielded better conversion than a more forceful call-to-action
The full report can be downloaded free at www.donordigital.com from the home page. It requires a name and email address.
