Is Your Organization Employing Best Practices for Online Donation?

Written by: Frank Iacono

While every non-profit organization has a different mission and approach to fundraising, those who achieve the greatest amount of success from their web-based donation programs typically employ best practices.

Below, please find the top 6 best practices that all non-profit organizations should utilize when creating an online donation form:

1. Maintain Consistent Branding. To provide a higher level of confidence in the donor clearly brand all forms with your organization’s specific web look and feel.
2. Remove Extraneous Navigation. To lower abandonment rates and increase web form donations remove all unnecessary links.
3. Create a Clear and Concise Form. To help donors complete the web form as quickly and easily as possible provide both clear and meaningful labels for all fields, making obvious which fields are required and which are optional.
4. Pre-populate Form Fields. To increase the speed of form completion and reduce the chances of typographical errors pre-populate the web form fields with information when the donor is already in your database.
5. Provide Pre-set Dollar Amounts. To encourage higher giving levels suggest donation amounts and provide multiple ways for donors to support your organization.
6. Add Email Auto-Responders. To reinforce the donor’s affinity with your organization send out an immediate email follow-up once the donation has been completed.

In order to be successful with your online donation program, you will need to conduct some upfront research and analysis to determine what works best with your audience.  Depending upon what your marketing strategy is and/or becomes this may or may not be a huge undertaking for your organization but it will truly demand that you truly understand online fundraising principles.