Creating a seamless donation experience on your charity website

Online donations are quickly becoming the lifeblood of charity income.

It is therefore incredibly surprising to see that many charities and not-for-profit organisations still have a dated and cumbersome digital donation experience.

This will be leading to many online donation opportunities being missed!

Following our recent infographic that defined the ideal online donation experience, we now look at how to create such a seamless online donation journey.

Define and map out the online donor journey.

Donors will fall into one of two key categories – returning and new.

Returning donors will have visited your website before, so our aim for this group is to make the experience as quick and easy as possible.

Clear signposting is the key!

Be sure to have a “Donate” button visible in every corner of the website.

New users on the other hand may need more support and information to help them convert.

Try to use as much data as possible to define their user journey.

Tools like Google Analytics can help you to identify pages of the website that are visited most, which is a great starting point.

From there you need to consider at what stage these pages fall into the wider donation experience, and then decide on the most logical next step for each.

Try not to overcomplicate this journey.

Whilst you need to engage the user with content, there is a fine line between not enough and too much, to encourage them to donate.

Ensure the experience is mobile friendly.

Yes, we’re still talking about it and yes, it’s still as important as ever before.

But being truly mobile responsive is about more than just making your website fit onto a mobile device.

The majority of online donors are going to be visiting your website on their mobile.

Whilst they may not have the same amount of screen space as their desktop counterparts, they do have a few things that desktop cannot emulate.

For instance, if the user prefers to make a donation over a call, a phone number can be set up so the user is just a tap away from donating.

Social sharing is also made much easier too, as it is more than likely that they are already signed into their social apps – this makes sharing with their network far easier.

Most importantly, speed on mobile is everything.

Mobile users are typically on the go and time poor, so try not to frustrate them by having a slow page load.

Save the big imagery and elaborate content for the big screen and leave the flashy animation and creative concepts for desktop.

A quick and easy donation process is what mobile users need!

Make payment easy (obvious right?).

It sounds simple right, but you will be amazed by how many charity websites fall at the final hurdle.

We have seen some of the biggest charities direct users off to third party payment systems, which offer painful slow load speeds and dated experiences.

It’s a sure way to end the user’s donation experience! Discarding all the hard work your marketing team has done to get them to that point.

Using a payment gateway on your charity website will help to automate any online card transactions.

Our preferred option would be Stripe as it is a dedicated eCommerce and fundraising platform, which can be integrated into WordPress.

You can set up an account in a mere matter of minutes and it is incredibly easy to use.

There are a bundle of options available to develop and adapt the platform further too.

Lasting thoughts

It isn’t news that the digital revolution has helped to completely transform the way charities and not-for-profit’s receive donations.

The outbreak of Covid pretty much put an end to the face to face street fundraising and door-to-door efforts.

Whilst we are seeing such approaches return, the last two years have shown everyone the power of digital and the importance of having a charity website experience that is able to successfully complete online donations.

The most successful and forward thinking charities will now have to utilise a range of design techniques and digital tools to help ensure a simple yet effective digital donation experience.