Remarkable Donate Pages

February 28, 2014      Admin

Yesterday’s post, Tighten Your Web, talked about the importance of attending to the fundraising efficacy of your website and its donation conversion process. We suggested some things to try and to test to improve its performance.

Now I’ve just come upon 10 Great Nonprofit Donation Pages as picked by web design company Wired Impact.

What strengths does Wired Impact point out?

  • Effective use of visuals
  • Upfront donor appreciation
  • Connecting donors to the beneficiaries of supported programs
  • Effective communication of where the money goes
  • Presentation of financial/charitable accreditations
  • Saying just what you need to — economy of copy
  • Very obvious “Donate’ buttons!

All presented with the utmost of simplicity.

The pages they like:

  • Livestrong Foundation
  • UN Population Fund
  • Project C.U.R.E.
  • Invisible Children
  • Saturday Place
  • World Wildlife Fund
  • Organizing for Action
  • Donors Choose.org
  • White’s Chapel
  • Rotary Foundation

I presume you have a file titled: Improving Website Capture/Conversion. Add this to it.

Tom

P.S. The shocker to me … none of these pages use video. But many of these commercial call-to-action pages do. Add this to your file too: 101 Examples of Effective Calls-to-Action from HubSpot (registration required). Here are the chapters:

Calls-to-action using contrasting colors
Calls-to-action presenting an incentive
Calls-to-action showing product
Calls-to-action using great text
Calls-to-action using spacial effect
Calls-to-action creating a sense of direction
Calls-to-action for email generation
Calls-to-action with primary & secondary options
Calls-to-action facilitating segmentation
Calls-to-action that make a good use of video
Calls-to-action with unorthodox shapes
Calls-to-action that reduce visitors’ anxiety

 

3 responses to “Remarkable Donate Pages”

  1. David Hartstein says:
    February 28, 2014 at 10:17 am

    Thanks a lot for including our post on donate pages Tom! Really appreciate it. I love your point about using video. It can definitely be a huge addition, emotionally engaging visitors in getting involved.

    Thanks again.

  2. Roy Furr says:
    February 28, 2014 at 12:24 pm

    Tom,

    I come from the for-profit direct response space. Specifically, big direct response publishers in the investment space.

    Frankly, I’m surprised there are virtually no ugly appeal letters online. You know it’s what works best in direct mail. And yet, all the rules for effective fundraising have been thrown out in the move to online.

    What the commercial direct response marketers figured out is that the internet is like direct mail on glass. If you have a sales story to tell, think of it that way. Put an ugly appeal letter online. Follow it with a donate button. Have that take the visitor to a donation form that restates what they just read in the appeal letter, in abbreviated form. And asks them to fill out the necessary information to make the donation.

    Heck, you could go one step further. Search online for “Video Sales Letter.” It is, in effect, an entire sales letter converted into PowerPoint slides, and read aloud. Stick that on a dedicated web page with a donate button below. Tell your story in words, voice, and the occasional picture. Get the one-to-one human feel. It’s effective in nearly every commercial market it’s been tried in — why not try it for nonprofits?

    Apply the principles that have worked in other media to the internet. It’s been proven to work in other industries, and other markets.

    In commercial marketing, we say one of the most dangerous things you can believe is, “My business is different.” I’d argue this can be easily translated to nonprofits thinking, “My organization is different.” Yes it is — superficially. But on a fundamental level, it isn’t.

    I believe this unwillingness to take the old and ugly principles that have worked in other media and bring them into this shiny new medium of the internet is the primary reason fundraising has failed to gain traction online.

    Have things like demographics been a factor? Perhaps! But the donor demographic is doing other business online — and has been for years.

    Why have they not been donating? The easy answer is to say it’s a reason we can’t control. The hard answer is to say it is something we can.

    Best wishes,

    Roy

  3. Dawn says:
    February 28, 2014 at 10:13 pm

    Agitator,

    I love your recent focus on conversion rate optimization and the user experience on nonprofit websites!

    But I respectfully disagree with Ms. Spivey’s list of “10 Great Nonprofit donation pages.” At least half of her examples stumble badly when it comes to expressing a compelling value proposition. Since 90% of web users read headlines but only about 20% bother to read page copy (the rest are skimmers), it’s imperative that you communicate the benefits of giving in your headline to achieve a high converting page.

    Donation pages with headlines like “Give Money”, “Donate” or “Support Our Programs” don’t say anything about why I should give—there’s no indication of what good things will happen (or what bad things can be stopped) if I complete the call to action.

    In my experience donation pages with headlines expressing no benefits typically don’t convert well. And ultimately, what makes a donation page great isn’t whether the page looks nice but whether it achieves the goal it was set up to accomplish—converting lots of visitors into donors.

    I wrote a blog article on this topic recently for Donordigital. You can find it here:

    http://donordigital.com/2014/02/raise-more-money-online-with-a-great-headline/

    Keep beating that drum on usability.

    best,
    Dawn

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