The top 2 tactics for a smooth online giving experience
Making an online donation to your nonprofit should always be a smooth, efficient process—this will help more donors complete their gifts, which will help you raise the funds you need to advance your mission. We asked EveryAction Client Services Specialist Romain Stanley for some of the top tactics we’ve seen organizations use to make their online giving experience more efficient.
Q: How can I create a smooth online giving experience for my donors?
A: It’s important to give your donors the smoothest possible experience when they’re making a gift.
We’ve found that set-it-and-forget-it capabilities are helpful, because not only do they create an easier giving experience for your supporters, but they can also help nonprofit staff by freeing up some of your own time to spend on more high-level projects. Two great set-and-forget capabilities we’ve seen that can be helpful here are one-click donation forms and self-service pages.
One-click donation forms
First, one-click donation forms can really smooth out your online donation process because they remember your donors’ information the first time they enter it, and that information gets pre-filled in future donation forms for a quicker giving experience.
Let’s say you’re a donor who’d like to make a gift to an organization you’ve supported for many years. You’re on their online donation page on your smart phone, so first you need to fill in all your name and address information, and then you need to get up and go find your credit card to complete the donation.
Even though you’re dedicated to this organization’s mission, it’s very easy to get distracted by a notification and exit the form without completing all the fields – or maybe you get interrupted by something when you’re up looking for your credit card.
A one-click donation form remembers and stores your contact and payment data, so that next time you want to make a gift that information is already there and ready to go. We’ve actually found that pre-filled donation forms convert at a rate nine times higher than blank forms, so this can make a pretty big difference in your donors’ giving experience.
Self-service pages
Second, we know donor self-service pages are helpful for organizations who want to create a smooth donation experience. If you’re a nonprofit staffer, you probably know how tricky it can be to try to track down a donor and connect with them in real time so you can update their info on the back end of your system.
A self-service page can empower your donors to enter updated information on their own time, and you can take this capability even further by setting up automated notifications to donors whose profiles need to be updated so that they can do it in a few clicks. This can help you avoid missing any gifts you donors intended to give you, which helps ensure you’re raising the revenue you need to execute on your mission.
