5 of the Best Not For Profit Donation Pages & Experiences
Not For Profits rely heavily on revenue and they typically get it from these three sources:
- Government Grants
- Outside Donor Organizations
- Individuals
Often the largest portion of their funds will come from grants or other outside organizations. With Individual donations usually making up the smallest portion.
Many smaller and local Not For Profits receive little of their funds from online donations.
Its hard to say why they receive so much less of their funding form individuals, but if you begin visiting Not For Profit websites and examining their donation experience - the donation process begins to stick out like a sore thumb.
It's not good.
Smaller and local Not For Profits often use a free or cheap 3rd party software that provides the donation experience. Which might sound great. However, free things still have costs.
The costs just may be hard to see because they aren't tangible in the upfront. There is an opportunity cost of a poor donation experience when online donors can't easily make a donation because their are too many barriers i.e.
- Too many questions before they can enter their credit card
- Weird pop ups that don't scale on mobile
- They get redirected to new and untrusted 3rd party website
What good is free software if you can't customize it to fit your needs or worse if it doesn't encourage or move a user to make a donation.
Well, we reviewed 50 different donation experiences and here are the leading Not For Profits that have donation experience worthy emulating:
Charity Water
Invisible Children
BarackObama.com
WWF
Saturday Place
Many Not For Profit websites ask online donors too many questions before allowing them to get to the money giving portion.
Let's think for a moment if this were real life, and not an online transaction, and someone stopped by to hand us a check - would we stop them and say "wait before you give us money you need to fill out this long questionnaire?"
We wouldn't do that, right?
We should design an experience that allows the user to first complete their task and then we can present them with follow up questions or other information that we would like to gather.
If we previously had a poor online donation experience and we redesign it leaving all other site elements the same we can measure what impact a more user centric approach has on our ability to accept individual online donations.
People are generous and they want to support organizations that do the good that they don't have the time to do - Let's make it easy for them to feel good about supporting Not For Profits with strong missions that they believe in.
Need help with your Not For Profit's donation experience application? Contact our team to: