This is the second of a three-part blog series which shares a few of the most effective fundraising tips we’ve been using recently.
This one focuses on the crucial stages of welcoming and converting leads / supporters from your appeal activity. The first post includes tips on appeal preparation and ways to attract leads / supporters and in the third post, we’ve shared some thoughts on thanking and donor nurture post-appeal.
So – having attracted tons of leads / supporters to your appeal, the next few steps are key to ensuring they convert well – how they’re welcomed on your site, and how smooth the subsequent steps of the journey are through to the all-important conversion.
Greeting your leads
Here’s a quick list of the things that should ideally be top of mind when crafting a landing page or pages:
- Think mobile-first as you plan the page content and layout, given that (for most clients now), the vast majority of your traffic will arrive on mobile
- Ensure continuity and consistency of imagery and messaging across your entire donor journey, whatever the starting point. It often makes sense to tailor different landing experiences to different audiences (for example, warm and cold), so factor that into your planning. It’s almost always worth the small additional investment
- Beyond must-have page content, such as clear single-minded calls-to-action and a succinct, engaging case for support, you might want to consider adding these elements to optimise your landing page:
- Scroll of recent donors to help everyone feel that they’re part of a successful appeal
- Current totaliser (once your appeal has raised a meaningful amount) along with your appeal goal if applicable
- Recognition for your corporate partners or ambassador supporters to inspire others
- Positive and inspiring statements from a long-term donor
- Think about ways to use your warm supporters’ data to personalise the landing experience. You could, for example, greet them using their first name, and even tailor elements of the page content to match their interests / motivation
Start with a best practice foundation for your landing pages. Then run tests as you go to give you the insights you need to optimise them.
Bonus thoughts: go live / make a day of it
Why not see if you could combine your appeal with an opportunity to share more of your impact? Host a handful of live sessions to introduce your work and beneficiaries in the middle two weeks of December. Post the content into edited clips to use either side of a key day. Perhaps offer some matched giving during the day, or coincide it with a recent drop of DM materials to help lift their effectiveness. Don’t fancy going live? Use animations and short clips / reels to help engage supporters in a similar way.
Converting leads to donors
We still see donation forms and payment interactions that are long, unresponsive / awful on mobile, limited in the payment types they accept, slow to load and poorly accessible.
Whenever you ask a donor to give online they judge your experience not purely based on how it compares to other donor journeys but how it looks and feels versus commercial retail / e-commerce. Your form and payment process should mirror conventional design rather than confusing people with novel approaches to UX.
We regularly see forms which convert at rates of less than 10%. Some are sitting between 1% and 5%. In these cases over 90% of the traffic is blocked, confused, unsure or turned away. Nine in ten leads which cost money to acquire, supporters who received DM packs and potential new donors walk away. This signifies waste which we can help you to reduce.
We seek to get year-round donation forms to convert at over 30% as a baseline. For targeted appeals, run by organisations with good public awareness, the conversion could be pushed to over 60%.
How do these figures compare to your form/ forms? If you are a little off the mark, let’s discuss how we’d advise you to polish things. Now is a great time to start some Conversion Rate Optimisation since Christmas learnings will ensure 2025’s marketing and acquisition budgets convert well.
8 places to improve online donation performance right now
- If your appeal is leading with a cash gift ask, not a regular or sustaining request, then default your donation form to take single gifts. Optimise around this frequency and carry the same price points all the way from marketing materials through a landing page and into the form. It is possible to promote regular giving as well, however we often find this cross-sell is better done later in the journey or at the end of the initial gift, not before someone starts their payment.
- Remove spurious requests for donors to log in. Even if they do have an account with you, bypass this need using a Personalised URL or token to automatically log them in. Offering additional friction from an initial log-in step is often found to serve the database more than the donor.
- Ideally offer warm supporters a PURL to land them into a personalised and optimised donation form experience.
- Share ‘enough’ price points on a gift array, ideally with concise descriptions of impact, in a mobile-friendly manner. Enough is usually 3 amounts. Sometimes 4. Rarely 5. Even more rarely 1, 2, 6 or more. What might seem a useful way to hedge your bets about how much someone will donate turns into a source of cognitive burden.
- We always recommend pre-selecting an amount. And determining via testing which is the most popular amount on the array. Tell people this! It helps offer social proof and reduces the degree of thought needed to answer ‘How much should I give?’
- Make it clear that donors can also choose their own amount, while removing currency choice unless your appeal is running globally. Reassure donors about their payment and data security, while displaying the card types or ways of paying that you support from the outset.
- Offer multiple e- or m-wallet options such as PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. We often see over 25% of income arriving via PayPal. And 15% to 20% via Apple Pay. Recognise people’s preferences and embrace them to ease conversion.
- Reduce the dataset you request from donors if possible, but ensure you capture permission to keep them connected to the impact of their gift. And ideally secure both an email address plus a postal address in order to assist with retention.
We have a cute PDF guide packed with many more tips for online donation forms. We’d be very happy to send you one. Pop us an email and we’ll immediately get the guide out to you!
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Not sure where to start or feel you have most of it nailed but want to squeeze the last drops out? We’re here to help! Say hi here or on LinkedIn – we’re always happy to share advice as well as benchmarks to make your coming appeal super-productive.
The holiday season is just around the corner. Let’s get started on your Christmas Appeal now to ensure you make the most significant impact possible! Our next post will take you through tips related to thanking your donors and nurturing them post-appeal.
P.S. Health-check your year-end campaign today by downloading our Festive fundraising framework!