Over the coming year, you can expect to hear plenty from Roger and me about care and retention of your current donors. As Roger’s book, Retention Fundraising, makes abundantly clear, why waste time and resources pouring fresh water into a leaky bucket? Plugging the leaks is the first priority.

That said, at this time of year understandably you might be thinking ‘new‘. Where will those new donors come from who will offset your attrition (which you are fixing, right?!) and indeed allow your nonprofit to grow?

Rented lists for direct mail? Sure, in some — probably most — cases.

PR-generated visibility? Events? Referrals via social media?

You own version of the Ice Bucket Challenge?

Let me suggest that no matter how interest might be generated in your cause or organization, the main gateway through which interested prospects will pass (or not) is your website. Thousands of ‘window shoppers’ checking you out.

So I’m adding a second item* to the ‘To do’ list I’m slowly dribbling out and recommending for 2015 — take a fresh look at the ‘stickiness’ and conversion success of your website.

Start with the home page, but of course include all pages to which your mail or media campaigns might direct prospects, all pages that are (or should be) attracting prospect-initiated viewing, all pages that actually walk your prospects through an online giving process, and all pages that have (or should have) some non-giving viewer engagement or information capture feature.

Here’s useful insight on this topic from Giving in a Digital World. They put ‘conversion rate optimization’ on the top of their 2015 ‘To do’ list. This article cites evidence that “47% of donors give-up before they have made the donation because the online journey is not intuitive and engaging”.

Says author Bryan Miller: “If you were to tear-up half of the donations you receive to a direct mail appeal then you would clearly be a crazily bad fundraiser. Yet failing to pay proper attention to what is happening on your donation pages could well be amounting to the same thing.”

Amen!

Direct mailers know the critical importance of their order cards and devote plenty of effort to perfecting them. Do online fundraisers and webmasters fully appreciate the importance of perfecting their online ‘order cards’? [See my earlier Order Forms and Landing Pages.]

No point generating heaps of web traffic or ‘window shoppers’ if you fail to offer an appealing and simple online conversion process!

Tom

*My first ‘To do’ suggestion for 2015 was to get really good at online video storytelling.