Donating Shouldn’t Require Target Practice
Your donor has decided to give but has your donation form decided to test their fine motor skills? Somewhere between the tiny button and the accidental tap, a fundraising problem becomes a design problem.
In 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts demonstrated a relationship that still matters to anyone building a donation page: smaller, farther targets take longer to reach. His work became Fitts’s Law. The practical lesson is considerably simpler than the equation: give people a generous target and a short trip to it.
The visual shows five ways to put that into practice:
For web controls, 44 × 44 CSS pixels is a useful benchmark, drawn from WCAG’s enhanced target-size criterion. Larger controls can help further, particularly for people with limited dexterity.
These principles apply beyond the Donate button: amount choices, payment options, checkboxes and receipt preferences all require someone to hit a target.
We spend considerable time trying to understand why people don’t give. Before commissioning another theory about donor motivation, check whether giving requires unusually good aim.
Kevin
Behavioral Science Q & A
Thanks so much for raising this. Yes, capturing donor information can be helpful for stewardship like newsletters, thank-you letters, impact updates. But how you ask matters. Forcing full data capture introduces friction that can significantly depress conversion, many donors may simply abandon the process. Beyond the friction itself, required fields also shift the emotional experience […]
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When a subject line leads with the match (“Your gift matched!”), it risks triggering market-norm thinking: the sense that giving is a financial transaction rather than an act rooted in values, identity, and care. This shift reduces intrinsic motivation and, over time, can weaken donor satisfaction and long-term engagement. It also makes the email indistinguishable […]
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There’s no evidence that QR codes suppress mid-value giving; all available research suggests they either help or have no negative effect. In fact, behavioral and usability research consistently shows the opposite: reducing friction at any point in the donation process increases completion rates and total response. And that has nothing to do with capacity and […]
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What you’re experiencing is very common. Resistance often isn’t about capability, but about motivation quality. If board members feel pushed into fundraising, that triggers controlled motivation (low quality motivation) i.e. obligation, guilt, or fear of judgment, which often results in avoidance. Instead, we need to create conditions for volitional motivation (high quality motivation) by satisfying […]
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That’s a really thoughtful question, and you’re not the first to raise it. Many of our clients have been cautious about placing the ask at the very end. To address their concern, we’ve tested both approaches, and the results are clear: when the ask comes last, even if that means it appears on the second […]
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