Looking for ways to boost your online revenue after a lack-luster year-end? Now’s the time to begin a donation page optimization program to improve gift conversion and increase revenue all year long.

Any non-profit knows how critical their donation pages are – they’re the main portal to online revenue generation, they’re the first page many of your online donors will see, and they play a huge role in whether or not someone will give to your cause.

Whatever route a visitor takes to land on your page, be it through email, search engine marketing, advertising, social media or word of mouth, ultimately the final decision to click that donate button happens on a donation page. And until that happens – all bets are off.

Good donation pages aren’t a fluke and they’re not universal. What works for a competing organization may not work for you, even if your missions are similar. It’s also imperative to remember that what you like or what you think will work best may not. The key to a good donation page is testing, testing, and more testing. You might be testing and refining your email program or pouring money into your digital acquisition, but until you test and optimize your donation page, your organization is leaving money on the table.

In the world of ever-changing online behaviors, international security updates, and ever-increasing mobile traffic, it is important that your donation form and organization are equipped to meet emerging trends and industry best practices.

So where should you start? We’re glad you asked!

First some methodology: The metric that we track for donation pages is the conversion rate. Conversion rate is the number of individuals that complete the page (i.e. make a gift) divided by the overall traffic to the page. In our experience, conversion rate can vary from 10% to 30% – often varying by traffic source –, and we’ve found that every organization can find a way to increase that number.

You’ll need to make sure that you know your conversion rate first (most usually pulled from your donation page platform or a third-party tracking system) before implementing a testing program.

Conversion is the most important overall metric, but as you dive deeper into donation page optimization, you may create goals for other KPIs; like average gift, number of new sustainers, etc.

 

As with any project, setting clear goals is critical. Spend some time figuring out your starting point – how did you get to your current form? Did you test into it? Who is your audience (non-donors, renewing donors, campaign specific, etc.?) What are the inherent limitations both for your organization as well as for the platform you use?

Once you have a good sense of where you’re starting, you can determine what metrics are most important and what results you need to gain in order to move forward. Are you trying to tweak a current page to be the best-performing version of itself or do you want to implement brand new form that adheres to best practices? When you compare your campaigns to industry benchmarks, what needs to improve? Is it the conversion rate, average gift, total revenue or do you need to reduce your page’s abandonment rate, upgrade one-time donors to sustainers, or increase the amount of an average sustainer gift? Spend a little time reviewing industry benchmarks and donation pages for other organizations.

As we’ve noted, there is not a one-size-fits-all answer to a great performing donation page. However, there are some important aspects to note:

  1. The best donation pages are those that are easy to use, clearly state the organization’s mission (and how the donor can help) and make the donor feel secure about making a monetary contribution.
  2. Images, the number of fields, security and third-party validators are some of the most influential components of the page.
  3. Your findings may vary for different audiences or traffic sources, so as much as possible, you should test with audiences specific to one channel.
 

Most often, we’ve found that a current donation form has enough components to test, that we just start with a head to head test of the old form against a brand new form modeled on best practices.  After we determine a winner in that test, we then begin to test individual components on the form.

Testing can take time, so make sure to give your organization enough time to get statistically significant results. You should prioritize your tests depending on your goals and campaign needs. Set up tests when you know traffic to your web pages will be high, but you also want to make sure you have an optimized donation page ready to deploy during your high-stakes campaigns, like year-end.

For most tests, you’ll just need to split your traffic 50/50 between two donation forms. There are a variety of third-party tools and platforms that can help you set up tests, including Optimizely, Adobe Experience Cloud or Google Content Experiments. Your web platform might even perform this traffic-split for you. Depending on your goals, you can capture a variety of data points (such as length of stay on page, scroll on page, data input into a form, etc.) to determine your winner.

Before your test goes live, determine what confidence rate you want a test to reach before moving on. We recommend a confidence rate of at least 95%, but 90% is acceptable and may be easier or faster to reach. Statistical significance measures the likelihood that the results of a test are real and repeatable, and not just due to chance. If your confidence level is 92%, that means, according to probability theory, there's a 92% chance that your results would be replicated if you ran the test again, but it does not mean you'd receive the same number of gifts or that the difference between the tests would be the same. 

Check out our easy to use statistical significance calculator for help calculating your confidence rate. Once you’re confident in your results, implement the winner and choose a new feature to test on your donation page. And the cycle continues as your donation page becomes stronger with every optimization!