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April 10, 2009

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

Friday April 10, 2009 | Permalink

Comments

1. Thank you for this article! I write grants for nonprofits, any information that assists us with resource development is very welcome. Writing Bench clients will benefit greatly from Jakob’s report.

   — Jeff Elkins    Apr 10, 03:05 PM    #

2. This survey is a wake up call for non-profits to audit their web sites regularly. Use a donor advisory group and listen for their feedback. Solicit suggestions for improvement directly on your site.

   — Mark Kordic, Advocace Media    Apr 10, 10:06 PM    #

3. 3. The challenge with website design and writing the copy is that the closer you are to the subject, the harder it is for you to objectively evaluate usability and clarity of message. For websites, nonprofit or otherwise, visitors are scanning and want to know within 5 seconds whether they’re in the right place. Three basic questions come to every visitor’s mind: 1) Am I in the right place? Or, Where am I? 2) Does this have what I want? and 3) Why should I stay? More specific to the NONPROFIT WORLD, these three questions could be rephrased: 1) Is this the organization I’m looking for? 2) What do they do and how do they do it? (i.e., your mission in plain English and not a corporate statement) and 3) How can I help and if I do, what will they do with my money? In general, keep it very simple so they don’t have to think. For websites to be effective, they need to work at a glance with no real effort on the part of the visitor. Karen Zapp, Fundraising Copywriter, http://www.PKscribe.com

   — Karen Zapp    Apr 11, 10:27 AM    #

4. There is no doubt donors are becoming a more discerning consumer. They want to know the who, what, why and how organizations are spending their hard-earned donated dollars. Pretty soon, NPOs may have to take a cue from grant proposals and start to be clear about how they are allocating their resources.

   — Paulette Pierre    Apr 13, 04:10 PM    #

5. I always look at an organization’s web content for planned giving. More often than not, the sites attempt to educate the donor on all of the technical aspects of planned giving. Even though the content is written in easy-to-understand language, there may be a negative effect in providing such information. Is it possible that providing too much information on the web-site undermines the organization’s ability to gain a face-to-face meeting with the donor/prospect? I don’t imagine a large number of planned gifts are consummated without some personal consultation with the charity. Would charities be better advised to limit the content on their web-site to a lesser amount of explanation? Should the primary focus of the web content be aimed at “getting the appointment?”

   — Jim Sereno    Apr 15, 08:27 AM    #

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