donation page

Boiling a frog online

nickellinger, , , , Leave a comment

They say that the way to boil a frog is not to put them in boiling water.  It’s to put them in cold water and slowly turn up the heat.  Because the change is gradual, the frog will not notice until it is boiled.

Who “they” are and why they want to boil a frog is still unknown.  But the somewhat unfortunate metaphor has a point — it’s often easier to get someone to make a big change in small steps.

Thus, instead of thinking in conversions (for example, getting a visitor to your site to donate), it’s often easier to think in terms of microconversions — the little steps that lead to your (and hopefully your prospect’s) goal.  As the great conversion expert Avinash Kaushik says, “Focus on measuring your macro (overall) conversions, but for optimal awesomeness identify and measure your micro conversions as well.”

There are a few ways you can make this work for you:

Track microconversions and how they lead to your ultimate goal.  Some of these microconversions can include:

  • Connecting with you on social
  • Commenting on a blog post
  • Taking an advocacy action
  • Signing a petition
  • Downloading a white paper
  • Looking at a donation page
  • Subscribing to your e-newsletter
  • Contacting your organization
  • Creating an account
  • Looking for directions to your office

From here you are looking at a classic consultant’s 2×2 matrix:

  • High usage of the microconversion; high conversion to your end goal.  These are the things that make you happy.  For example, if action alert usage is the highest activity on your site and advocates are among your most likely people to donate, you are doing your job well.
  • Low usage of the microconversion; low conversion to your end goal.  You can ignore these things for now; they’ll require a lot of work to get into shape.  You have lower hanging fruit.
  • High usage of the microconversion; low conversion to your end goal.  This is one form of an opportunity — you want to work to optimize the path from the microconversion to your end goal.  Let’s say many people are downloading your white paper, but few of them are donating.  You might find that your communications are largely around different topics from the white paper and your asks aren’t related — these are all fixable things.
  • Low usage of the microconversion; high conversion to your end goal.  If almost no one is commenting on your blog, but almost everyone who comments donates, you should be working to get as many people as possible comment on your blog.

Also, if you are getting fancy, you can compute the value of each microconversion by looking at the donation history of people who take the action.  I’d advise you to get fancy, but the matrix is a good start.

Test a multi-stage donation form.  Tradition says that you click a big button that says “Donate” and you are taken to a long form that you fill out in its entirety.  Tradition will get you all of the gifts that you traditionally get.  The boiling a frog analogy works here; people want to finish things they start, so turning a long form into a series of microsteps easier can increase your overall conversion rate.

Heritage Foundation tried this technique and found it increased registrations by 99% with a two-step versus one-step form.

A few ways to do this include:

  • Ask for a donation amount up front.  If you mouse over a donate button, an ask array or a free response question can capture an amount immediately and pass it through to the next step.  It’s a simple step and once someone has taken that action, they are more likely to fulfill their donation.  (And if they don’t, you have a solid ask amount for their next visit or remarketing.)
  • Separate the credit card information from basic address information, with the address first.  Credit card information is the most personal information, so you want to get someone to volunteer their more basic information first.
  • Remember to use the period after donation confirmation to make a monthly giving ask as described here.

 

Introduce your surveys with easy questions first.  There is a reason that professional pollsters save questions like race and household income to the end — they come at a time when the subject is already psychological committed to completing the survey.  As we’ve discussed, commitment is a very powerful thing.  (Also, because if the person stops at that point, you still have the main data you want.)

If you are doing an online survey, start with a simple question up front, then build on future screens.  An online progress gauge is also helpful.  When a person knows there’s only 20% left in the survey, they are more likely to complete it (just like they are more likely to donate when there’s only 20% left in a campaign).

The big commonality with all of these techniques is to start small and build to a larger commitment.  It won’t help convert those who come to your web site looking to make a donation (OK, may it might), but it will help you build commitments among constituents who are less certain about taking a big step forward in their relationship with you.

Boiling a frog online

Simplifying your donation form

nickellinger, , , , 1 Comment

This week, we’re going to look at different online techniques you can try to help increase your conversion and donation rates.  I’d love to be able to share your ideas as well, so please email me at nick@directtodonor.com with your comments and case studies.  Or leave them in the comments section below, where we actually have intelligent conversations, unlike some sites (*cough*cough*YouTubecomments*cough*cough*).

 

henry_david_thoreau1

We’ll start with simplifying our donation page.  As patron saint/oversoul of simplification Henry David Thoreau almost said:

“Our [donation form] is frittered away by detail… Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity*! I say, let your [form requests] be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”

Let’s start from first principles.  What is the point of your donation page?

It’s not a trick question.  The point is to get donations.  Anything else on that page should be subordinated to helping the person coming to the page make the donation for which they came to the page.

Once you have this as the aim, you’ll find that many of the things you put on that page don’t help in this regard:

Top navigation.  You should still have your logo that links back to your home page.  After all, you could do as well in user interface design with the maxim “never make the user use the back button” as you could in Christianity knowing only the Golden Rule.  In each, there’s a lot more to learn, but that one bit will get you through for now.

But do you need the link to each area of your mission, your about us page, and so on?  You do not, because the goal of the page is to get donations.  Take a look at St. Jude’s home page.

stjude.gif

 

It serves those who want to learn about, engage with, and donate to the organization.  However, once you go to donate, they know what you are there for and everything else melts away:

stjudedonation

Only those things necessary to make a donation remain.

Extraneous fields.  The donation form is not the place to ask for your entire database to be filled in.  Thus, prefix, middle name, and suffix can all be deleted.  Nor is it the place to ask for things you are interested in, but do not need.  Thus, phone number, fax number, connection to the cause, etc., should all go away.  (This is not to say you shouldn’t ask for them; that’s why God invented the confirmation page and/or post-donation survey.)

Any more convincing than is necessary.  I’m being intentionally vague here.  The challenge is that people come to your donation form from very different places.  If they came to your site, clicked on your light box (which we’ll talk about later in the week), and got to your donation form, they probably need some convincing to donate.

On the other hand, if a person subscribed to your e-newsletter, got your welcome series (you do have a welcome series don’t you?  If not, learn the basics here), and clicked to donate on the final email, they have already followed the journey you set out for them.  They are convinced and converted, so get them on their way successfully.

There was a great test I recommend a read of here.  In a nutshell, a nonprofit was testing their donation form, which normally had a video at the top of it, versus a back-end book premium.

The key to this test (I believe) was that it connected with email — people would already have been sold once they got to the page.  Thus, the non-video version had three times the conversion rate of the video version.  The goal of the page was to get them to donate, not to get them to watch the video.

This isn’t to say that the video can’t be an important part of the conversion process; just that it probably doesn’t belong on the donation form.

Similarly, reducing copy at the top of this email acquisition campaign increased response by 26%.

So I would definitely test taking much of the verbiage out of your donation page and see what happens to your conversion rate.

Remember, a simple donation form is (usually) a converting donation form.

* Yes, he said “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” instead of “simplify, simplify, simplify.”  I was surprised too.

Simplifying your donation form

Let’s get small: microimprovements

nickellinger, , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

402px-david_von_michelangeloThere is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that someone watched Michelangelo retouching every inch of one of this statues.  The bystander asked him why he bothered with such trifles; the artist replied “Trifles make perfection. And perfection is no trifle.”

In the direct marketing world, it’s difficult to say that there is such a thing as perfection.  You will likely never see, in any quantity, a 100% response rate or open rate.  But our goal is to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

There rarely is an idea that you have that will double the completion of your online donation page.  But you can find 16 ideas that each get you five percent better, each one compounding to double your response.

So without further ago, a few small ideas that may make small (or big) differences.  In no particular order:

Change the color of your donate button to something not approved in your brand guidelines.  It will stick out.  Good.  Things that stick out get clicked on.  When this starts to lose its effectiveness, change it again.

Reduce the size of your download.  A Sprint phone downloads an average of 11 MB per second on 4G .  We can easily design pages with enough extra code and random things to download to cost an extra second.  One second lost means 7% fewer conversions.

That’s probably why water.org has their homepage look like this:

water

But their donation page looks like this:

 

waterdonationpage

Increase customization by a variable.  If you do name, do name and location.  If you do name and location, add in donation history.  Et cetera.  These are more than 5% tactics. 

Add a small donate bar at the top of your site.  Human Rights Watch reported (at DMA’s DC nonprofit conference) that the below orange bar and a larger orange footer on their site increased donations from the home page by 256%.  Many days, I’d settle for 2.56%.

Go into Google AdWords.  And do what it says to do.  If it recommends splitting up your keywords, it probably knows that doing so will allow you to customize your copy.  Punctuate your headline properly.  It knows that increases click-throughs.  And so on.  It will keep bringing up these opportunities; you just have to act on them.

Try adding a picture.  Not necessarily guaranteed, but a quality picture will usually improve a home page, mailpiece, donation page, content marketing, etc.  I’ve found a significant difference in the traffic I get from blog posts with pictures over those without.  Hence David hanging out at the top of this one.

Call some donors.  Ideally some of your best, but these thank you’s will both help with the donor’s loyalty and give you ideas for things you can try (or stop).

Take some fields off of your donation form.  Phone number?  Ask for that afterward.  If you have the ability to divine city and state from ZIP on your form, go for it.  You are looking to streamline this process.

Similarly, reduce the clicks to get to the donation form.  Hopefully, it’s one or zero (that is, you can start entering info on the Web page).

Remove the navigation from your donation page.  Now is not the time for someone to want to look at your executive’s pictures.  Four tests show improvements from the tiny to the oh-my-goodness here.  

Run a test.  Are those ask amounts correct?  How do you know?  If you are mailing, emailing, or calling with the same thing for 100% of your communications, you are missing out on your 5% opportunities.

Hopefully, one of these gets you 5%.  If it does, please leave it in the comments.  If it doesn’t, please let us know in the comments what did.

Let’s get small: microimprovements