Back in October, we make the argument that we aren’t retaining donors; we’re burning them. That is, because humans are loss averse, if you want someone to pay attention to an issue, it’s better to talk about avoiding losing something than keeping something.

I’m now thinking that the same applies to online donations. Right now, online giving is a single-digit percent of overall individual giving. What digit that is depends on the study but, no matter which one it is, it’s less adoption than online transactions almost anywhere else. And while it’s growing, it’s growing at or below the rate of other industry segments.

Part of this is current nonprofit donors are less likely to have digital as a preferred channel. But it’s also because we aren’t firing on all cylinders. According to data presented at the 2016 DMA NYC conference, only about 40% of nonprofit sites are mobile responsive. Not surprisingly, mobile responsive sites are more likely to get membership signups from mobile devices (transactions that are likely left on the table by nonresponsive organizations).

This isn’t the only example. DonorVoice and The Agitator worked on data about PayPal: requests for PayPal or lauding PayPal was the #5 comment by people leaving feedback at major nonprofits.

But the biggest category where we are burning donors is also the scariest: a bucket called “I don’t know.”

In years of cataloging feedback for nonprofits, we’ve found that there are some things that cut across almost all major nonprofits as pain points — things like wanting fewer mailings, the desire to designate gifts, or problems with the challenging category of honor/memorial gifts.

And yet, there are also challenges for each organization that we’ve never seen before with any other organization. Things like:

• An acknowledgment email that was four pages long. People were printing it for their records and shocked that the basic data couldn’t fit on one page.
• A temporary glitch where all donations, big or small, were acknowledged as $40 gifts.
• Actual anger about having to put in a title on the donation form — it was a required field for that organization
• A confirmation email that had last name with no title, so it would say (for example) “Dear Ellinger,”.  Mr. Wiener was particularly displeased about this bug.
• Asks that led to the page asked for $15.  The smallest amount on their donation form: $50.

And more.

Thankfully, all of these organizations were able to fix these errors as well as some of the ones that cross organizations like PayPal and designating gifts.  All of these were simple to fix and all of them were discovered by people whose experience was bad enough that they either did not give or said they would not give again.

Before these fixes, there wasn’t an absence of retention.  There was burning donors.

So should you secret shop your own site?  Absolutely.  But if you designed it, you are probably more in the know than your prospective donor.  And that donor may have desires or needs that you can’t imagine.  I once had someone want to know how he could donate a cow.

(Seriously. A cow.  Not all feedback can be accommodated.)

Really the only way to discover how the people who didn’t donate or aren’t going to donate again got burned is to ask them.  So even if you don’t use us for feedback, we strongly recommend you collect it somehow.

Because you have something like the $40 glitch or the last name bug or the confirmation email that prints like Tolstoy.  You may just not know it yet.  And that’s burning donors.