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May 16, 2008

How to Make Online Donations Surge

Simple changes can often make a huge difference in how much money a charity’s Web site raises.

Amnesty International learned that when it tested several different approaches to see what was most effective. Donordigital, a San Francisco consulting firm that helped the charity has released some of the results, the charity achieved.

Among the highlights:

• Increasing the size of a button that said “click to donate” resulted in 25 percent more gifts from people who landed on the donation page.

• A red “donate now” button produced 29 percent more gifts than the charity’s former gray button that simply said “submit.”

• Decreasing the amount of personal information people are required to enter before making an online gift made a big difference: When Amnesty removed online spaces for people’s professional title and suffix (e.g., Mr.), the number of donors increased by 31 percent.

To conduct the tests, Amnesty used a software program that randomly directed online visitors to slight different versions of the charity’s donation page.

Charities might be tempted to make the same changes Amnesty did to their donation page, but Donordigital officials said groups should do their own testing. “Results from your organization’s supporters may differ, so testing is paramount,” they write.

(To learn more about how organizations are experimenting with new online approaches to recruiting donors, see this Chronicle article.)

— Holly Hall

Friday May 16, 2008 | Permalink

Comments

1. A great new tool for doing this kind of work (A/B split testing and even multivariate testing), making it much easier, is www.google.com/websiteoptimizer. Google has optimized it’s own pages over the years with continual refinement based on data from constant tests. <a href=“http://dalelarson.com”>-Dale</a>

   — Dale Larson    May 16, 09:48 PM    #

2. Dale makes a great point, one that we reference on page 7 of the report (http://www.donordigital.com/projects/donordigital_donation_page_optimization_research.pdf). The concern we voiced in the paper about Google’s website optimizer is that it does require that the user have a rather high level of testing and analytics savvy in order to set-up meaningful tests and evaluate results.
   -Melissa Tooley, Dir. of Research & Analytics, Donordigital

   — Melissa Tooley    May 20, 01:28 PM    #

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