How To Make Your Website A Fundraising Winner

January 30, 2014      Roger Craver

Yesterday Tom outlined how to destroy your website. Today, in the best yin and yang tradition of The Agitator, here’s how to make your website the very best of breed.

WAGER:  I’m betting there’s no more than one out of every 10,000 nonprofits in the world with the guts or patience to follow the process I’m about to report. It’s donor-centric but also so very, very counter-intuitive to what most fundraisers would do if they were in charge of re-making a website. I’m pretty certain (sadly) my bet is a sure thing.

Please prove me wrong. Because, if you implement this process you’ll likely see:

  • A 250% increase in revenue from your website;
  • A 90% increase in monthly donors; and …
  • A 150% + increase in folks willing to register or signup for more information and engagement.

Let’s get started.

Recommendation #1: Begin by removing the ‘Donate’ button from your homepage and just about everywhere else on your site. Unless users of your website are hiring it to make their giving of money easier, ‘donating’ is not a Top Task.

Ah, I can hear the screams of ‘heresy’ already. All those blogs. All that misinformed, non-empirical advisory bullshit indicating the ‘donate’ button has to be prominent and frequent.

Here’s the reason why I’m suggesting something far different. And it’s related to Recommendation #2.

Recommendation #2: Find out — as in actually survey, talk to users of your website — what Top Tasks the users want your site to enable or perform. Chances are their priorities aren’t at all what you think.

At this point, enter The Norwegian Cancer Society and a user-consulting firm named Netlife Research and witness the most extraordinary marriage of nonprofit and consultant I’ve ever witnessed and I’m dying to share with you.

Convinced they weren’t realizing the potential of the web for fundraising and public education, the Society hired Netlife and together they set out on the task to remake their website. To answer the question: What matters most to website users and what matters very little? The only question that really matters regardless of what your 22 year old webmaster might tell you.

Before I report on what happened, a bit of background. The ‘old’ society website had 4,000 pages. Between 40 and 50 people in the organization could post content. There was no central editorial control on what content went in, what came out, or in what order.

So far, sound familiar?

At this point the scenario changed dramatically from what most of us have experienced. The Society and Netlife gathered together all the stakeholders — at this point I’d call them silos — and they agreed they should really ask the users what mattered. They drew up a list of 70+ ‘tasks’ they thought the website performed.

Then they asked actual website users to vote on what features were the most important to them. Here’s what they found in order of user priority:

Top Tasks:

1. Treatment

2. Symptoms

3. Prevention

4. Research

Tiny Tasks at the bottom of the priority list:

1. Donations

2. Gifts

3. Annual report

4. Press releases

That’s right. Out of 70+ tasks, users voted ‘donations’ as about the 66th most important priority.

So … fighting a tidal wave of denial, the group met again, discussed the finding and agreed (there was a lot of gnashing of teeth, lest I over-simplify this stage) they would remake the website to reflect the users’ priorities.

Here’s what they did:

  • Everyone representing a silo within the organization signed a contract promising to abide with the ‘new rules.’
  • The site was reduced from 4,000 pages to 1,000 pages.
  • Whereas 40 members of the staff were authorized to post content before the reforms were made, today only 5 people can add, modify or delete content.

I reached Beate Sørum, head of Digital Fundraising for the Society, and we had a great chat as snowflakes flew in the background of her Skype screen. (The Agitator is weather agnostic and will brave all conditions for you, dear Reader).

Here’s how Beate summarized this marvelous and extraordinary adventure:

  • What was very obvious was that making a donation was not a top task for people who visited the website.
  •  In trying to get more donations, the traditional approach would be to devote much of the space on the homepage and other major pages to asking for donations.
  • The logic goes that the less attention people are paying the harder we have to work to attract it. And that is in fact how the old homepage for the Cancer Society looked. It had lots of banner ads asking for donations and support.
  •  The new approach is very different. It now focuses on helping people get the information they need (treatment, symptoms, research) as quickly as possible. There are no banner ads for donations.
  • This is true customer-centric design — putting the needs of the customer front and center. In appropriate places, such as on research pages, there are carefully phrased requests for donations. Why? Because if someone is reading about research, then it is appropriate to ask them in that context.

“So Beate”, your intrepid Agitator asked, “How has this worked out for you?”

  • Year over year comparisons of giving on the old website versus the new find the new producing 200% and possibly more than the old. (The exact increase will be known when all year-end gifts are tallied.)
  • An 88% increase in monthly (sustainer) contributions.
  • Average gift is up and, even more significantly, the conversion rate (web browsers to web donors) is up. Conversion rates from their Christmas appeal were 13% overall … 10% by mobile … 17% by tablet … 13% by desktop.
  • Perhaps most important of all, by sharply focusing the site to meet users’ top needs the Society has reached its strategic goal of making the Norwegian Cancer Society the most trusted name where the issue of cancer is concerned.

The reason this is working so well from a fundraising standpoint is that the Society is paying attention to the ‘job the user is hiring it to do.’ And the discipline displayed in asking for donations only in the context of the prospective donor’s needs and interests is paying huge dividends.

Beate and Netlife you both deserve a great big Agitator Raise. Go to Beate’s blog for more detail on the fundraising decisions made in this web project

Roger

P.S. For those Agitator readers who are thinking about or working on changes in your website I recommend you listen to the webinar and download the power point on this remarkable piece of work.  You can access both here.

P.P.S. Special thanks to Gerry McGovern for his post alerting The Agitator to this special case history. If Gerry’s blog New Thinking isn’t on your ‘must read’ list it should be.

 

 

 

 

6 responses to “How To Make Your Website A Fundraising Winner”

  1. Heather says:
    January 30, 2014 at 10:21 am

    Way to agitate, Roger! This case study sounds convincing to me. I have always thought that the “common knowledge” to make a website’s donation button prominent was based in user research. But perhaps that isn’t true.

  2. Kim Silva says:
    January 30, 2014 at 10:49 am

    Weather agnostic. LOL!

    Interesting case study. I think many of our people actually go to our website to make a donation since we are driving them there through our solicitations and other communications. May we have more case studies about this? I’d love to hear how a small nonprofit applied the idea. Thanks for the post!

  3. Simon Scriver says:
    January 30, 2014 at 1:05 pm

    Hmm…I think there’s a lot more to consider here and I don’t think getting rid of the donate button is a very good recommendation.

    1) If you look at the old website there wasn’t really much of a donate button there anyway. It was a ‘Shop’ button reasonably well hidden.

    2) The new website is all round so much better, which is a driver for people deciding that you are a good organisation and worth donating to. I would suggest that this is probably the reason for an increase in donations. And I think donations could probably be increased even more with the new website AND a decent donate button. What we have isn’t a great test: the only true test would to only change one thing: a donate button or no donate button.

    3) Alarm bells at asking the users what they wanted from the site. I’d be very curious to see the actual analytics of which pages were visited most. I’d guess the donate page would be much higher than 66th.

    I don’t want to be a cynic – but I just think we’re misinterpreting the results here.

    Still, I love the work Beate does and LOVE that she shares results/data – we can all benefit from more sharing. And thanks for the blog guys…love it.

  4. Beate Sørum says:
    January 30, 2014 at 2:06 pm

    Thanks for the kind words about our case, Kim and Heather. It has been really fun to work with, and a great oportunity for busting some myths and saying “I told you so!” 😉

    You can find a more in-depth description of the fundraising side of this case in my blog http://beateinenglish.wordpress.com. I’ve detailed some of the techniques used to increase the digital income there.

    As for what the top tasks are, I agree that these will of course vary by the type of charity – we, as a cancer charity, naturally have finding out about cancer as a big task.

    Our main point about the donate now-button is basically that this *doesn’t* actually solve the task of donating. People get banner blind, and it lets you be “lazy” in your communications; instead of including thoughtful asks and making the content good fundraising; people tend to think “well, the donate now-button is right there, so they can obviously donate”.

    What we found was that removing these banners, and just having a menu item and carefully placed asks in or near relevant content, has on it’s own doubled our online income.

    In addition to this, our conversion rate is much better when we do drive traffic through solicitations. We hardly ever drive the traffic to the home page however, we drive it to carefully crafted landing pages. All our donation forms are made portable, so I can create new landing pages in a few minutes, with content that mirrors the communication you were touched by to minimize the risk of losing the donors focus and/or emotional state.

    Let me know if you have any more questions, I’m happy to answer:)

    -Beate

  5. Denisa Casement says:
    January 30, 2014 at 10:23 pm

    Very interesting case study, particularly for charities whose mission includes public education and research resources.

    Empirical… now there’s an idea. The only way to gather empirical information is with a split test, which is fairly easy. Just create a mirror of each page, one with and one without a donate button. Split your visits between the two and see which has the highest donation response rate.

    What Beate has done is actually a very sophisticated update of a charity website. Well done! But there are so many wonderful things going on in the new website, trying to hang the changes in response rates on a single hook is overly simplistic.

    But Beate makes a great point in her comment… it’s lazy to think that just having a donate button on every page will drive the donation process. Customized landing pages and asks incorporated in relevant content are really smart and they’ve reaped the results.

    Thanks, much to learn here!

  6. Beate Sørum says:
    January 31, 2014 at 6:28 am

    Simon,

    Thanks for your comment 🙂

    I completely agree to a lot of your comment, there is much more to this case than can be simplified in a blog post, of course. But at the core of it all is daring to prioritise, in my opinion. A big reason for why the page is now much easier to navigate (and thus donating is more easily available), is the very strict prioritisation. My comments to your points above:

    1) There were quite a few banners, the shop button, and an entire menu dedicated to donations on the home page before. To be honest, I personally would have wanted it to be more visible today too, but adhering to the decisions made about target audience, that just was not the way to go.

    2) We have a very good reputation, and are universally known in Norway. Thus I don’t think that a clearer webpage eased the decision in a “do I support his work”-way. However, I absolutely agree that the new, slimmer, clearer page contributes to increased donations too. But simply because everything is easier to find. I used to think that we could have increased donations even more by it being more visible all over. I’m not sure it would make that much of a difference anymore though, seeing how well the asks in appropriate places work. Of course, this would be different from charity to charity; for us it could actually be ..rude, inappropriate really, to ask someone to donate while they where trying to find out if they have cancer. I’m sure other charities could benefit from being much more upfront about it. We are also much more upfront on campaign pages (like the christmas appeal: https://kreftforeningen.no/jul/). But even here, the donate-button comes in context, as an ask, not as a stand-alone feature. A stand-alone donate button will often be ignored by users, as it is a victim of banner-blindness; people just don’t see it because they are focused on the content. I would also love to see a test on this:)

    3) Again; more than meets the eye here. We used a process called Customer Carewords (http://customercarewords.com/), where we did in-depth interviews with stakeholders within and outside the organisation, and based on that came up with the task list of what people where trying to solve on our page. This list was subject to a quantitative survey. The results where the answers to what the users wanted. That, paired with what the organisation wanted, gave some clear pointers for way forward. The idea being to let people get what they came for out of the way first, THEN introduce them to something WE want them to do in addition. Like donating 🙂

    All in all, I think we agree on most things here. Yes, it is absolutely a too big overhaul to name *one* thing responsible. But if I was to name one, daring to make priorites is the one. Half our visitors are on mobile platforms. If they don’t find what they’re looking for right away, they leave. So we have to give them the most important thing (to them) first. Otherwise, we don’t get a chance to talk to them 🙂

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