Want more online donations? Optimize your donations page!
Here’s a great article from our friend Brady Josephson from NextAfter!
Here are four ideas..
Online fundraising can seem complex. You’ve got so many different tools to figure out. All that data you can get and track. Rules, regulations, and ‘best practices’ are often changing. A lot of different people have different ideas on how you can do online fundraising. And, for many of you reading this, online is just one part of what you do, not all that you do.
To help shed some light on this subject as it relates to Canadian charities, last year I signed up to get email updates from 152 Canadian charities and then made $25 donations to all of them. I captured and scored each area — email signup, fundraising emails, and online giving experience — to produce The Canadian Online Fundraising Scorecard.
The study is free and in it you’ll find all the stats and key findings but today I want to focus on a simple framework to help with how to think about online fundraising and then provide some ideas to improve your online giving experience based on the research study and some real examples from the world’s largest online fundraising experiment library.
Three strategies to grow online fundraising
When it comes to growing your online fundraising, everything you do should really fit under one of these three main strategies:
- Get more (quality) visitors to your website.
- Get more of the people visiting your website to make a donation.
- Get those making a donation to give more on average.
And the beauty of those simple strategies is that they correspond to the 3 Online Fundraising Metrics that Every Nonprofit Needs to Track:
- Traffic
- Conversion Rate
- Average Gift
If you multiply those three metrics together, you get revenue. So if you increase traffic, and the other two remain the same, you’ll raise more money. And if you can increase traffic and conversion rate, with average gift staying the same, well then you’ll raise even more money.
That’s pretty straightforward — I hope — but understanding how to get started is one of the biggest questions we get asked. So much so, that we recorded a whole podcast episode to answer it, When It Comes to Online Fundraising, Where Do I Start?
I’ll spoil part of the podcast and let you know that, often, one of the easiest things you can do to raise more money online is to optimize and improve your donation page so more of your current visitors — as many or as few as you get — are more likely to donate.
So with that here are…
