Donation Page Optimization Domination
David Schwab
Chief Strategist @ DIG | Performance Marketing and Digital Revenue Operations Consulting
In my last article, I made the audacious leap from socks to your fundraising tech infrastructure. It’s a good read if you haven’t seen it yet- but to summarize: your success this season requires a solid foundation. As we get into the #FundraisingTips to help you raise more with less effort this giving season, it’s imperative that you have a solid foundation to build from. Your technology needs to be reliable and scaleable for you to take full advantage of these optimization strategies - otherwise you may well find yourself working harder just to keep things running the exact opposite of what I want for you!
Alright, now that we agree socks + fundraising = insane growth, it’s time for my first #FundraisingTip to help you raise more with less effort this giving season. It’s time to optimize your donation page!
If you want to get straight to five ✋🏻 winning donation page conversion rate optimization (”CRO”) strategies you can steal, jump ahead now. But if you want to understand the “why” behind the “what,” keep reading!
Why start with donation page optimization? Why not ads or email or content or social? The answer is simple: because every other fundraising strategy culminates on your donation page! Every tactic, strategy, tip, hack, or magic thing you try - including all the other tips to follow today’s - rely on one thing: your donation page being ruthlessly efficient. When you can trust your donation page to convert then your job gets tremendously easier! It goes from “how the heck am I going to pull this season’s goal off” to “I know how to make this happen!”
Donation page optimization is the number one way to increase revenue without increasing ☝🏻 effort and ✌🏻 budget. Every percent you increase conversion rate (total donations / total donation page traffic) is a literal cash deposit 💰 added to your net revenue for the season! But donation page optimization doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t ever stop. That’s why you need to start testing now. You need to know what works and what doesn’t work so when you unleash the floodgates you have the same confidence I do that this year will be the best one yet!
Ok - now that the “why” is clear, let’s get into it. Here are five CRO ideas to steal for your own donation page optimization domination:
1️⃣ Remove the image from your donation page. 😱
That’s right - that beautifully designed image you made to connect your donation page with your amazing appeal. Cut it. Studies from the Moore Neurolab have shown that removing images from donation forms increases the conversion rate because there is less distraction from the donation form.
In practice I’ve seen this firsthand:
📈 Increase conversion rate by as much as 100%
📈 Increase revenue (thus campaign ROI)
📉 Decrease bounce rate by as much as 100%
📉 Decrease load times as much as 2-3 seconds (if you want to understand the impact that has, google “how website performance affects conversion rate” and read the Cloudflare case study)
2️⃣ Reduce the Number of Fields OR Implement a Multi-Step Donation Process
It is no secret that we love to gather as much information about donors as possible to, er, “cultivate a relationship.” The form on your donation page is not the place to do it though.
Did you know you only need two fields to process a gift (credit card number and zip code)? Now I’m not saying this is right amount, but I am saying you probably have too many fields on your donation form. In fact, HubSpot published a study a few years ago of CVR across 40,000 pages. Forms with 4+ fields dropped CVR by about 10 percentage points vs forms with 2-3 fields.
Focus on getting the critical gift processing information (CC + Email + Zip) as quickly as possible then use post-gift opportunities (survey, email, landing page) to append that information.
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Another option: A Multi-Step Conversion form. If you have to have all that contact information, create a multi-step process where you gather the critical gift information first and then the remaining information on subsequent clicks - this creates positive velocity and will increase CVR while gathering more information (bonus, it also opens the door for upgrade offers - while I’ll talk more about in my next post!). Funraise has adopted this model for our fundraising forms with wild success - converting 50% of donors who engage with a donation form!
3️⃣ Test New Donation Page Layouts
Your “tried-and-true” donation page layout with a header image, copy on the left and a form on the right? It can probably work better. Try putting your form in a new spot on your page. Move your copy below the form or to a different side. Change where you put badges, quotes, and other icons. Try a new background color. Every tweak you can make has the ability to impact performance. But keep in mind, every layout you try needs to:
4️⃣ Test Your Ask Array
One of the most forgotten parts of a donation page is the ask array. All too often I see organizations defaulting to the standard, out-of-the-box, programed ask array. If that’s you, it’s ok, just take this as your invitation to unlock even more hidden potential in your donation page. Optimizing your ask array creates a more personalized giving experience, which delivers double value: increased conversion rate and increase average gift. There is so much to test and learn when it comes to your ask array - enough that I could write an entire post dedicated to it - but we’re going to keep this simple.
Here are the three core ask array options to test:
Ask Order: You can set your ask array to increase or decrease in value. Jury’s out on best practice. Test it to see what works best for you!
Ask Amounts: This one will take the most amount of testing. I like to start by structuring the ask around your current average gift. Have one ask slightly lower, one close to the average gift, a slight stretch, and then a large stretch ask. This gives you the most coverage so you’re not isolating micro donors nor minimizing larger-capacity givers. As you gain data here you can continue to adjust amounts to bolster average gift and conversion rate!
Selected Ask Amount: You should be pre-selecting an ask amount on your donation forms. If you’re not, that’s test #1 🙂 From there experiment with the different ask amounts in your array and see what delivers the highest gift and best conversion rate.
💡OR💡 You can tap into tools like Funraise 's personalized giving forms to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate this entire process and deliver 100% personalized, optimized, ask arrays to every donation page visitor!
5️⃣ Social proof
This tip is one of my favorite, a strategy that’s quickly being adopted from the for-profit sector. Adding “social proof” - things like quotes and rolling donation lists - to donation pages taps into the psychology of “belonging.” People want to be part of a group, particularly a successful group. When you’re able to show potential donors that others have gone before them and had the experience they’re hoping for. It’s why word-of-mouth was such a powerful marketing “strategy” and why influencer marketing maintains a top position in almost every marketing campaign today. How can you test this? Try one (or all!) of these:
👉 Add a powerful donor “testimony” (”I chose to give to organization xyz because I believe in the mission and see the change in my community it is making!”). Try rotating testimonies, placing them in different locations, adding them to your donation process - particularly if there’s a stage that has a higher-than-average abandonment rate.
👉 Test showing gifts made in real-time, the threshold of gift you show (ex. only show gifts at or above X dollar amount), the amount of information you share (name, amount, location - obviously without giving away too much information!). Test a donor wall vs. pop-ups vs. a rolling ticker-style display.
WHEW! That was a lot. As I said - I want to give you tried and true strategies and ideas that you can implement right now. Some of these won’t work for you, but some might just be a game changer. I’ve spent years assembling this testing strategy - I’ve paid the experience tax for you to reap the return. All I ask is that if you try one of these tests, you come back here and share your results. We’re in this together and when we learn together, we win together!