Digital Must-Haves for Fall Fundraising Success Part 2: One-Click Donations
Editor’s note: this post was originally published in September 2020 and was last updated in July 2022.
It’s never too early to start planning for your nonprofit’s GivingTuesday and year-end fundraising efforts. In this 6-part blog series, we’re highlighting key digital features your organization can start implementing now to boost fundraising this fall. Last week, we went over dynamic ask strings. This week’s topic: one-click donation functionalities.
What is a one-click donation?
One-click donation is what it sounds like: a feature that gives donors the ability to support your nonprofit with only a single click. This is made possible by enabling pre-fill functionalities on your online donation forms so that when a donor goes to make a gift, the form in front of them already displays their existing data from your CRM (customer relationship manager), including contact and credit card information. You can share one-click enabled donation forms across digital channels, or even by adding a QR code to your non-digital channel asks.
Why should nonprofits use one-click donation forms?
The beauty of one-click donations is their effectiveness. Pre-filling donors’ information in online forms means they’re more likely to complete their gift. In fact, when National Audubon Society used email to test the performance of one-click donation forms vs. standard forms, it found that donors were over 9 times likelier to convert on a one-click form. The nonprofit also raised nearly 9 times more revenue from fundraising emails that used one-click donation forms.
Simply put: if you can minimize interruptions while a donor is making a gift—like needing to step away to find their credit card—they’re likelier to complete that gift. And when you give supporters a smooth donation experience, they’re likelier to continue giving to you in the future, which helps you raise more for your mission.
How can my nonprofit make the most of one-click donations?
Fundraisers can give donors a more user-friendly gift-making experience by incorporating one-click donations across a range of channels and campaigns—here’s how.
Form design
Make sure your forms match the rest of your campaigns and channel presences—you don’t want donors to be confused by a form that looks out of step with the rest of your web pages or messages to them. With EveryAction’s latest updates, you can use the new Design step to make sure your one-click enabled forms present a consistent look and feel to your supporters, no matter where they interact with them.
Whether this is your first time or your 20th time prepping for year-end season, you know how important email is. During 2021’s year-end season, organizations on the EveryAction platform actually broke our single-day email send record not once, but twice: once on GivingTuesday and once in December. In M+R’s 2022 Benchmark Report, researchers found that while email list sizes grew by 7 percent, the amount raised from every 1,000 fundraising emails dropped 3 percent in 2021. The average response rate to fundraising emails fell 11 percent.
In this context, it’s more important than ever to stand out in your supporters’ already crowded email inboxes. It’s never a bad idea to invest in effective and ethical creative that prompts subscribers to open and read your email. Then, once they’ve opened your messages, one-click donation forms can boost conversions by keeping the donation process as uncomplicated and convenient as possible.
Mobile messaging
High clickthrough rates and continued growth in SMS lists mean nonprofits can use this emerging channel to take their fundraising further—and one-click donations can help. Mobile messaging can be useful for fundraising given that M+R’s 2022 Benchmarks found 54 percent of nonprofit web traffic came from mobile devices in 2021. However, the Benchmarks also found that mobile donors consistently “give at lower rates, with lower average gifts” than desktop donors—which means for many fundraisers, their goal for year-end mobile donors is to make it easy for them to give more.
One-click donations can be a useful tool for raising more with donors who approach your website on mobile. Along with a digital presence optimized for mobile and tools like a sustainer upsell lightbox, you can encourage those supporters to convert on your forms and easily give more over their donor lifetime, so they can do even more to help you advance your mission.
Key takeaways
One-click donations are a time-tested, powerful solution that helps remove unnecessary and tedious steps from the donor experience. EveryAction’s powerful FastAction network includes millions of saved donor profiles and enables nonprofits to raise more money, more efficiently via form pre-filling and one-click donation capabilities—get a demo to see how tools like EveryAction can help you do even more to move your mission forward.
