Previous |
Next Even Beauty Queens Find Raising Money in the Recession Is Tough |
April 10, 2009, 11:51 AM ET
Confusing Web Sites Discourage Donors From Online Giving
Poorly designed nonprofit Web sites are deterring many donors who would be willing to give to charity online from doing so, suggests a new study conducted by the Internet research firm Nielsen Norman Group.
The group asked study participants to examine the Web sites of 23 nonprofit organizations with a wide range of missions and to choose one to support.
“We observed several donation killers that caused some of the charities to lose out,” said Jakob Nielsen, an expert on Web-page design, in a written statement.
Chief among them was poor presentation of the charity’s mission. The first thing most participants looked for was a description of the nonprofit organization’s goals and objectives, but only 43 percent of the Web sites included this information on their home pages.
Participants also said that they wanted to know how their contribution would be spent, but only 4 percent of nonprofit Web sites stated on their home pages how they used donations.
While that information was often contained on other parts of the Web sites, poor page design and unclear content often hindered users from locating it. In fact, on 17 percent of the sites, people were unable to find where they could make a donation.
The report delivered a particularly harsh assessment of organizations with local chapters where there was little integration between affiliates’ Web sites and those of the national organization.
Donors had less difficulty with the actual online procedure for making a gift, although some had problems with third-party payment services used by some Web sites.
“Were they to fix these turn-off factors,” said Mr. Nielsen, “we estimate that they could easily double donations.”
— Paula Wasley
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.