Even if your online fundraising efforts are going great, there is always room for improvement! It’s time to smooth out the friction and make it easier for people to donate to your cause. Here are five steps that can bring incredible transformation to your donation experience.
Step 1: Identify your donation page’s primary goal
Is your goal providing a giving experience that maximizes the number of gifts at the highest amount? Is your goal making sure everyone creates an account with your system? Is it making sure the donor enters the correct solicitor code so you can properly attribute the gift in your database?
The bottom line is that you need to clearly articulate your goal. Without a goal, you can’t determine what’s helping and what’s hurting your fundraising efforts.
Step 2: You can’t fix what you can’t measure.
This one is easy and free—get Google Analytics integrated with your e-commerce system.
- If you don’t already have an account, you can easily create one for free on the Google Analytics website.
- Second, you’ll want to enable Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics. This gives you access to really powerful information like the average donation size and donor conversion rate.
- Implement the Google Analytics tracking code on your page.
- Take the ultimate step and start adding tracking codes to every link to your donation page from emails, banners, social media, etc. (This is easy with Google URL Builder)
Step 3: Create a “radical redesign” of your online giving experience
Focus your redesign on the following:
Length Friction
- Reduce the number of steps required to complete a donation.
- Reduce the number of fields required to complete a donation.
Difficulty Friction
- Remove unnecessary gift designations.
- Review the buttons and links that lead the donor through the online donation experience; Do they make sense? Is it clear what the donor needs to do next?
- Get rid of registration process; configure the giving experience so that the donor can give a gift without having to create an account.
- Test your giving page to see how fast it loads. If it is longer than 3 seconds, there is a problem.
- Test your giving page on different devices. If you can’t easily give a gift on your cell phone, neither can you donors.
- Create a mobile optimized version of your online giving experience and code your page so that version is served when someone visits on a mobile device.
Step 4: Set up an A/B split test that serves each version of your donation page in equal rotation
Don’t feel overwhelmed – this is easier than it sounds.
You can easily setup a split test for free using Google Optimize.
Set your goal and start testing!
Step 5: Validate results to 95% level of confidence
So how do you know if your testing is working? A great place to start is by using the NextAfter Validation Tool.
- If the test does not reach 95% validity, keep testing.
- If the test does validate, you’ve learned something important about your donors.
In the end, always apply what you learn and never stop growing!
