How Important Are Your Donate Pages?
Last week we triggered a robust discussion of optimum website Donate pages.
Lots of good suggestions, reported here, including specific examples various readers recommended.
Just how valuable are those pages? Consider this finding from Penelope Burk’s recent donor survey, looking at nearly 12,000 donor/respondents in the US (more in Canada) …
- 83% of respondents said they conduct research on not-for-profits that they are considering for support and the most common way they do this is by spending time on the websites of charities in which they are interested.
- Some donors go to not-for-profit websites with the specific intention of making a gift online (36%); but others visit primarily to update themselves on news and recent activities of charities they favor.
- This latter group is definitely open to the possibility of giving, though, if they are satisfied with what they find. 32% of donors not intending to give during their most recent visit to a not-for-profit website actually followed through and made a gift as a result of what they learned.
I’m especially impressed by that last bullet, even discounting for typical survey respondent over-statement.
Lesson: you can’t do enough to try and improve your Donate pages. But your efforts need to be grounded on live testing, not intuition.
Tom
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