Yesterday, we covered the two most frequent donor feedback comments.  Today, we’re going to talk about #3, #5, #9, and #12.

Why jump around?  Because they all have to do with online giving:

• I want more online giving options!
• Make it easier to donate online!
• Why doesn’t it save my info online?
• That’s not what I saw online/offline!

For more online giving options, 45% of these comments ask for different payment mechanisms, whether PayPal or additional credit card options.

According to a BizRate study, PayPal is the third most preferred option for payment (behind Visa and MasterCard) with 14% of consumers preferring it.   While PayPal does skew younger (32% of millennials prefer PayPal) and nonprofit donors skew older, this feedback validates the notion that PayPal is not to be ignored as a payment source.

Some of these are challenging, given the inflexibility of most of the largest online donation platforms.  Donors want to be able to acknowledge multiple people with their honor/memorial gift and give under the name of multiple people (usually a couple or a family).  This would need to be a request that multiple organizations make to said donation platform providers to get greater flexibility.

We know some of those providers read The Agitator.  HEAR THE DONORS CRYING, DONATION PLATFORM PROVIDERS!

Other issues are premium-related.  When a back-end premium is promised, some donors want to be able to make a larger donation and receive multiple premiums.  Others want to be able to opt out of the premium and have more of their donation go to the nonprofit.  Either of these should be accommodatable requests by using a pseudo-e-commerce functionality for multiple premiums and an opt-out box for the premium.

As for ease of donation forms, the most common issues in the United States aren’t in the United States – they are accepting international donations.

As for ease of donation forms, the most common issues in the United States don’t involve the U.S. per se–the problem lies in the difficulty of  accepting international donations.  This usually breaks down into currency issues (how do you accept a donation for 20 Canadian dollars or Euros?) and address challenges (entering foreign postal codes and state/province information).

Not every nonprofit has to worry about this, as they would be unlikely to get international donations.  However, the way to assess this is not, as is often done, seeing how many donations you get from other countries.

Rather, the only way to assess this is to set up feedback mechanisms.  After all, with a poor international donation experience, you could have high international interest in donating and low actual international donations.  Considering this issue is more commonly reported than the well-known “I put in the wrong amount” complaint, it is worthy of consideration for even nonprofits that do not traditionally considered themselves in the international business.

Another common comment that showed up in different ways is that some donors  want to be able to print both their confirmation page and their acknowledgment email for their tax records in order to capture all the relevant information, and have it take only one page to print.

Usually a nonprofit will have either the confirmation page or the follow-up email optimized for printing, but not both.  These comments indicate that donors would rather do it how they wish rather than how you would like them to do it.

“Asking for a field you don’t need” was a common complaint as well, but the fields in question varied greatly.  Here are the votes (in descending order of popularity) for what donors considered annoyingly extraneous:

• Title
• Email
• Phone number
• How did you hear about us?
• Address
• Birthdate
• City, state, ZIP
• Last name

Obviously, you do probably need last name for all transactions and address info for credit card donations (perhaps not for newsletter sign-ups).  But this does lend itself to two tips: 1) to decrease the number of fields – especially required fields – whenever possible and 2) to justify those fields you do needs.  For example, if you want to get email addresses, a statement like “We need this to send you your receipt.”

“Why doesn’t it save my info online?” is a rather self-explanatory category and, by definition, the people asking for the functionality are your best donors (they are trying to give again).  A bit over 2.2% of respondents wanted to make sure their info was saved online.  Other requests included updating their information (usually addresses and email addresses), canceling their monthly donation, and changing credit card information online.  One solution for this is to set up a donor portal section of your website that allows for these tasks.  Unfortunately, this is often a customized build, given the dearth of support for this functionality in the out-of-the-box market.

Finally, there’s the category of different offers in different channels that result in channel dissonance.  Two comments rose to the top of this category: 1) have a place for your member number on the online form and 2) the website doesn’t mention the offline match.  While there were other comments, these two comprised 81% of comments.

We all know by this point that the most valuable donor is a multichannel donor.  While this is likely because more valuable, committed donors will seek you out on different platforms, rather than different platforms causing donors to be more valuable, the effect is the same here: you can do better by making it easier for your donors to cross media.

For now, this manifests most often in having a match in both places, but you can also feature similar stories in both places, include “as heard on radio” or “as seen on TV” buttons on your online promotional images to direct mass media donors, and conduct pre- and post-mail email campaigns for your most impactful campaigns.

Semi-related, we also saw some people incensed when the ask in the email was $15 and the smallest amount on the donation page was $50 – another donation flow mismatch, but within the same channel.

Other online concerns you are hearing?

Nick