Online ‘Donation-Killers’
We’re developing a bit of theme this week, sticking with online fundraising.
Thanks to Joanne Fritz at About.com for bringing attention to a report on nonprofit websites by Jakob Nielsen, the guru of website usability. Done over a year ago, I confess to completely missing this one.
Joanne summarizes his report, which costs $188 (but there’s an executive summary).
Somewhat to my surprise Nielsen downplays the actual transaction process, noting that once you get the donor to the stage of actually making the transaction, the payment process looks familiar to most donors, as they are by now trained at making online purchases. So I guess we owe a ‘thank you’ to our commercial online retailing brethren for plowing the ground with respect to ‘shopping cart abandonment’.
Termed ‘donation-killers’ were poor page and unintuitive site design, unclear content, missing information and confusing terms. Guess what? These are generically the same ‘donation-killers’ as a direct mail piece that is not written and presented from a donor-centric perspective. Some things don’t change across media.
The study suggest that fixing even minor usability problems could increase online donations by 10%.
Does that get your attention?!
Tom
One response to “Online ‘Donation-Killers’”
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Thanks for mentioning me, Tom! I love Jakob Nielsen’s work…it is always very specific and really has “legs.” That is, it will be good advice for a long time. Not to mention that it is based on real users really using the technology.