Best ways for you to boost online charity donations

Why is it important to optimise for online charity donations?

A recent study found that more than a third (35%) of donors like to donate using cash, 33% prefer to give online, and 25% shared that they donated via direct debit (2). And given that direct debit payments are commonly made online, this provides a clear incentive for charities to optimise for online donations.

However, approximately three in ten (29%) charities claim they are poor at making the most of their website (3), which is likely to mean that they aren’t reaching their online presence potential.

It’s therefore imperative that charities prioritise their online presence for the following reasons:

• Improved accessibility – Charities can reach a wider audience from anywhere in the world which leads to more donations from people who previously wouldn’t have the opportunity to donate
• More convenient – Removes the need for donors to physically visit or meet your charity as they can make donations at any time, from anywhere, providing that they have an internet connection
• Instant donation process – Online donations can be processed swiftly and efficiently, allowing you to receive funds and put them towards your cause(s) quicker
• A cost-effective approach – Eliminates the need for physical infrastructure and reduces administrative costs associated with manual processing of donations
• Provides data analysis – Encourages the use of valuable data that can be used to analyse donor behaviour and preferences to strategise and improve the optimisation of your fundraising efforts

Charities should make optimising their website for online donations a priority. As donation preferences are seemingly leaning more towards an online approach as the years go by, failing to do so can leave you falling behind as the charity sector continues to become increasingly digitised.

Read our definitive guide to implementing effective charity website development

Our top tips on optimising for online charity donations

The key to a successful campaign is a clear and engaging pathway that encourages your supporters to make a donation. Remember, it doesn’t matter how good your digital fundraising campaign is. If donors cannot make it across the finish line, it won’t count for anything - and no charity can afford to let opportunities slip through the net!

Understanding why you should optimise your website for online donations is the first step. Now, it’s time to put that theory into practice by taking decisive actions that allow your donor experience to truly flourish.

In this section, we share the best practices that you should implement as part of your plan of enhancing online charity donations for your organisation.

#1 Implement a suitable CMS for your charity’s website

Implementing a charity-specific content management system (CMS) for your website is the first crucial step for any donor manager. With this piece of software, it will enable you to create a user-friendly and interactive experience that outlines a clear donor journey from the moment your supporter enters your website all the way through to performing a sign-up or donation.

A charity website CMS offers the following features:

• Efficient content management – Enables simple creation and editing of content such as blogs, news updates, and donation appeals
• Enhanced donor engagement – Encourages donors to engage with your content which can help increase retention rates and improve the overall user experience
• Clearer donor insights – Provides real-time data surrounding behaviours of your donors which assists with reporting and strategising future improvements to the donor experience
• Demonstrate transparency – Share regular updates through your website, or integrate to your CRM and share automated emails in relation to your charity’s activities and how the donations are being used based on your donors behaviors and interests
• Integrate with other platforms – Integrating with other platforms such as payment processers, email platforms or social media accounts allows you to have a really smooth experience for your supporters

Although a CMS will form the foundation of your online donation plans, you should ensure that it is a suitable platform that meets the niche requirements of your charity. Failure to implement a charity-focused CMS can instead lead to your organisation not reaching its potential with your online fundraising campaigns.

Read our Access Charity Websites vs WordPress guide for more information

#2 Integrate your website with a charity-specific CRM

While you can manage your online charity donations via your website in isolation, this can limit the vision you have of donors and the campaigns they have engaged with.

Alternatively, you can integrate your website with a charity-specific CRM which will sync the processes of both platforms. The benefit of this is that it will align your processes more clearly, as you will be able to gain access to your donor database and understand how their behaviours align with your campaigns. From here, it will provide a clear insight into what type of content resonates with your supporters, allowing you to acknowledge the campaigns that work well and those that require personalisation to meet their requirements.

This integration is also imperative for automated processes. For example, based on the donor data presented by your CRM, you can send automated email campaigns to your donors to keep them informed about how their donation has contributed towards a respective cause and future relevant charity campaigns. Depending on what your donor database shows in relation to their interests and preferences, you can personalise your automated campaigns accordingly!

Integrating these platforms is a great step to building stronger relationships with your donors and enhance your online presence.

Read our article to find out more about the benefits of charity website – CRM integration

#3: Identify any barriers

Increasing online charity donations will involve improving conversion rates. For this to be achieved, you must identify any barriers within the donor journey such as understanding how many people you are losing and why.

Look at your charity website analytics. Specifically, track the numbers that make it to your donate page and at which point others leave your website. From here, you can look at the live page to understand why this may be happening such as:

• Unengaging page that has been poorly written and/or formatted
• No links that continue the donor journey
• Unclear call to actions

The clearer you are about the respective obstacle, the easier it will be to resolve. Once the amendments have been made, you can then track the changes. If you’re still losing donors, go back to your analytics and try and make improvements from another angle. Remember, it is a process. Don’t worry if you cannot find the right formulae straight away.

Read our guide on how to increase relevant traffic to your website

#4: Drive content towards your website

If you aren’t currently using other channels to divert traffic to your website, then this is a great opportunity to boost online charity donations.

Regardless of which channels you choose to implement, you must plan an effective strategy whereby people are redirected to your website to perform an action such as making a donation or signing up for an event.

The channels you could use to boost traffic to your website include:

• Social media platforms – Share relevant information with respective links for your supporters to find out more
• Paid ad campaigns – Free digital ad campaigns from Google Ad Grants that help target key pages you want to advertise on Google
• Email marketing – Include a selection of relevant content that comprises of success stories, events, donation pages, and volunteer opportunities while embedding the relevant links to your webpages

Remember to include clear call to actions regardless of the platforms you choose. These should outline the topic of the respective webpage link, while encouraging the reader to engage with this content further.

Want to find out more about driving content to your website using SEO? We asked our own SEO specialist to go through the basics every charity needs to know.

#5: Reduce your load time

Load time can have a crucial impact on your online charity donations. According to Google, there is a strong correlation between website load time and conversion rate. They found that the chance of bounce increased by 32% when a page went from 1 to 3 seconds, by 90% when loading went from 1 to 5 seconds, and a whopping 123% if a site takes up to 10 seconds to load [4].

These statistics are a cause for concern, especially as the recommended load speed time should be no longer than 2 seconds. Thankfully, there are certain steps you can take to help reduce your load time, such as:

• Optimising images – Compress your images using online tools to reduce the size of your images without increased pixelation
• A reliable web hosting service – Choose a web hosting service that provides good uptime and fast servers
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) – Store your static files (images, CSS, and JavaScript) on multiple severs to ensure your website loads faster for visitors from different locations
• Minimise HTTP requests – Reduce your number of images, scripts, and stylesheets
• Enable caching – Store a copy of the respective page on a user’s device, so when it is revisited, it loads quicker
• Reduce the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files – Remove unnecessary characters, comments, and whitespace

As user experience is a key element of SEO ranking, it’s crucial that you reduce your webpages’ load time to avoid high bounce rates. By taking the above actions, you can improve your website’s user experience, leading to higher page rankings and more frequent donations.

#6: Plan your landing pages carefully

People are scanning when they visit your website, so you need to be thinking about quick-access information.

If you’re running a digital fundraising campaign, make sure your external links point to a dedicated landing page to ensure that readers know they are in the right place. As for the pages themselves, you should ensure they are informative by either answering a query or encouraging the reader to take part in an activity. In short, be clear about the purpose of each page. You can ensure this by:

• Breaking your copy into digestible chunks
• Including clear headings and sub-headings
• Including informative bullet points
• Including relevant photos
• Designing engaging media e.g. infographics and videos (but keep load time in mind!)

As mentioned in the previous point, you want to avoid bounce rate at all costs as it will make successful online charity donations virtually impossible. For this reason, you should aim to make your webpages both interactive and informative from the outset!

Read our guide on how to get the most out of your website’s content

#7: Keep your donate page simple, savvy and secure

Where online donations are concerned, there is a lot we can learn from the retail world. In this sector, it’s been found that 26% of online sales are lost to ‘long and complex processes’, 17% to ‘trust’ and ‘website errors’, and another 16% to ‘slow delivery’ [5]. Sound familiar?

These are all issues that transfer to online charity fundraising, so keep your donate page:

• Simple: One page is enough. Only include essential fields and remove CAPTCHAs. The more complicated your form looks, the less likely people are to complete it.
• Savvy: Technology savvy, that is! Above all, make sure your donation page works. Lengthy transactions, cumbersome processes and a lack of mobile responsivity are all quick ways to turn people away.
• Secure: Show your brand, use a known checkout provider and make sure your security badge is visible. People need to know they can trust your site with their details - or they won’t!

Accepting online donations for the first time?  We’ve got a great blog outlining the tools you need to get started.

#8: Clarify your ask…

Don’t just give donors stock options of £5, £10 or £25 with no explanation. If you can, develop a list of asks that showcase the actual costs of key project activities and take a few words to explain their impact. The more tangible and precise the ask, the more donors will feel part of the solution.

#9: … And share your success!

Continuing on from the previous point, you should follow this up by sharing success stories that have been made possible by your supporters’ donations! These can be accessible on a certain area of your website and should include key details such as:

• What the cause was for
• What inspired the campaign
• Who was impacted
• How the donations have helped

In addition, provide your online donors the chance to share this content and inspire friends and family to do the same via social media. ‘Share on social media’ buttons give your donors immediate kudos and inspire them to highlight their contributions with pride!

Read our guide on how to maximise your website’s conversion rates

#10: Strategise effective ‘nudge marketing’

‘Nudge marketing’ campaigns can be an effective strategy to implement if they are planned correctly.

There is a balance to strike here. As a fundraiser, your job is to inspire, never pester. But that does not mean you can’t adapt some of the ideas and techniques that work for you. A well-planned message delivered to the right people at the right time (and through the right channel), could be just what you need to rekindle online support.

Several methods you could adopt include:

Automated pop-ups – Advertise fundraising campaigns, events, and volunteer opportunities when certain webpages are visited

Personalised ads – Target personalised ads toward people who have already visited your website and taken a certain action e.g. stopped halfway through the donation process

Remarketing campaigns – Implement dynamic ads to remind users of specific events or causes they have engaged with and encourage them to take action

Video ads – Use video ads to tell the story of your charity to build a connection with your audience by invoking an emotional response

Remember, your supporters already care about your cause, so these techniques should serve as a gentle reminder!

Improve your donor experience and receive more donations

The key to gaining online charity donations is to ensure that the donor journey of your website is engaging and free from any avoidable obstructions. Once this has been strategised, it’s crucial to analyse your donor data at each stage of the journey to understand their behaviours, allowing you to attune your campaigns in line with their interests.

Once donations have been made, you shouldn’t stop there. Campaigns such as email marketing are an effective method of engaging with your donors to ensure that you continue to keep them informed about the causes they have donated towards and future events that may interest them. By following these key steps, you gain a stronger relationship with your supporters and encourage frequent online charity donations.

Do you feel that you require a more charity-centric CMS after reading this article? Our experts are readily available to speak with you further.