Keeping Your Charity’s Donors in the ZONE
By Joseph Bornstein | CEO & Founder of CauseMatch.com
Did you know that 50% - 70% of donors who click “donate” on a charity’s donation page will abandon the donation process? That’s right, you have gone through all the hard work of getting the donor to your website, getting them to say “yes, I want to give to you” and sadly, 50% - 70% of the time, the donor will simply abandon the process.
This is a reality for all online vendors. It’s called “checkout abandonment.” There are many factors that contribute to checkout abandonment, but one of the leading drivers is what the industry refers to as “friction.” Friction can take many forms. It is anything that creates a barrier between the donor clicking “donate” and her completing the payment of her gift.
The antithesis of friction is what the casino folks in Los Vegas refer to as “the zone.” The zone in Vegas is the holy of holies. It’s that quasi-conscious mental state that people get into when pulling the slot machine lever over, and over and over. The idea of “the zone” is to keep the casino’s patron as comfortable and not thinking as possible. The more that lever gets pulled, the more money the casino makes. From the air temperature to the level of music, the pitch and tone of the music, the frequency at which food and drink arrive, the type of food, the lighting — you name it! Everything, and I mean everything has been scientifically tried, tested and calibrated to achieve maximum “zone-effect.” The less thinking and the more level pulling, the more money and the happier the casino is.
It is the exact same with online giving. We want to keep your donors “in the zone.” The giving experience and process should be as fluid and streamlined as possible. Since we’re dealing with a virtual environment, we don’t have air temperature and lighting to play with — we have pixels, questions we ask, stages of the giving experience. All these factors must be carefully analyzed and tested to maximize the amount of dollars raised.
Common mistakes include:
- Too many fields for the donor to complete: We’ve all seen those donation pages that look like an IRS form. Selecting title, gift allocation, PO Box and so many other nuances before capturing the payment information. All these seemingly harmless questions create friction and that friction means donor abandonment.
- Too many calls to action: Donation pages should be focused on one thing — completing the transaction. That’s why additional calls to action should be severely limited. Whether it’s in the sidebar, the header, or anywhere else on the page. These extra calls to action (e.g. sign-up to our newsletter, or the About Us in the header) are all distractions from completing the gift.
- Too many choices: Asking the donor to make another choice is about the worst type of friction possible. It’s one thing to ask a donor to mindlessly fill-out various extraneous fields. It’s an entirely other type of friction to force the donor to THINK, to make another choice. For example, asking the donor, “do you want to cover the credit card fees?” is a common mistake. Now, rather than the donor seamlessly and effortlessly completing his transaction, he has to ponder, “Well, should I indeed cover the fees?” Forcing that decision creates what’s called the “paralysis of choice.” No matter what decision he makes, he loses. If he covers the fees, he loses more money. If he doesn’t cover the fees, he feels bad about himself for being stingy. Now you may be thinking, “yes, but 80% to 90% of my donors DO choose to cover the fees, so it can’t be so bad!” The answer is that while it may be true that most of your donors who complete the transaction end-up covering the fees, you have no idea how many donors never even gave because you introduced more friction, the friction of choice and thought. Your job isn’t to save fees. Your job is to raise as much money as possible. That’s why you need to see the forest and not the trees. In the world of online giving, less (friction) means more giving.
The #1 Rule for your fundraising page should be focused on creating a streamlined and simplified giving experience. 28% of all checkout abandonment is due to too much complexity. So try to limit the fields to the ones that you really need. Make the checkout page clean and simple to complete. Add a little visual to keep the donor engaged. And above all, keep it simple, simple, simple!
