According to the latest findings from Classy’s: “60% of people who check out on a donation page do so in less than a minute.”
However, the state of modern philanthropy 2020 report informs that when it looked at how long people do spend on campaign pages across all campaign types, it saw conversion rates peak in the 4 to 5 minute window, which suggests that people who are engaging with the campaign content have a higher likelihood of converting.
For your crowdfunding, peer-to-peer, and event campaigns, provide the right balance of meaningful content and storytelling to capture visitors’ attention and prompt them to immediately convert, or continue learning to eventually convert.
The data in this report reflects performance on the Classy platform from October 1, 2018, to September 30, 2019. This includes over 40,000 active campaigns from nearly 4,500 organizations that raise anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars annually on the platform.
Giving gateways - mobile
60% of traffic on Classy comes from mobile and of that 50% comes from social media platforms. Keeping a close eye on traffic referral sources is one way to better understand where your supporters spend their time online.
Even if you are not using any fundraising platform, Google Analytics is the best and free tool to answer your query. Assuming that your website is linked with Google Analytics, you will be able to find your answers under the Audience and Acquisition section. You understand what device a particular age group is using and what are the different traffic sources.
Obviously these would be raw data and they would make business sense. Unless you use them in two ways:
Use the insights while creating a new audience set for digital ads.
And the most effective way is using them while creating your online personas
Donor activity - conversion rates and time spent
The data states that on Campaign Pages, 70% of visitors take action—either bouncing or converting—within the first minute and convert at 11%. However, conversion rates climb significantly when time spent increases, peaking at the 4 to 5 minute window.
But when it comes to Donation Pages Classy states that 60% of people who make a donation, do so in less than one minute. These findings point to the highly optimized nature of these forms and that people landing on these pages have already made the decision to donate.
The question that a nonprofit should ask itself is how can it make Donations Pages more effective. In other, can a nonprofit remove the anxieties and make the giving process simple?
I have answered this question in an earlier post - How can you make Donation Pages effective
One of the common mistakes that nonprofits do is asking way too much personal data. Do we really need them? And by doing so the nonprofit only increases the friction and makes the job of donation difficult for the donor.
40% of organizations required non-essential information to complete a donation. This means they required information other than what was really needed to process the gift. This could be a phone number, a title, CAPTCHA, or a question about how you found out about them. The most required non-essential information was a phone number (25%).
Both Cry and Care India are terrific examples of increasing frictions on their donation page. But We/Can show you how to do it by gathering the bare minimum personal information. Recently I did a small test to understand the online donation experience of 4 nonprofits - Save The Children India, Care India, Cry India and We/Can.
Donor pathways
To observe how donors re-engage with nonprofits, the data looked at donors with at least two interactions to understand trends in follow-up behavior.
When donors return to take a second action, they tend to return to their first campaign type. This behavior was strongest in donors to registration with fundraising campaigns—91% of donors who first gave to registration with a fundraising campaign and returned to take a second action, did so again with another (or the same) registration with a fundraising campaign.
The report also finds that a large percentage of donors who first give to crowdfunding campaigns go on to donate to a donation page.
Further examination showed that there are two main points when donors return: the first is within one month of their first interaction, and the second is at the year mark. For those returning within one month, the data shows them making a second donation, likely to their own personal fundraising page.
Donor communication via Email is the most potent tool for keeping them engaged. There are two important things to remember here:
Crafting your donor email communication journeys. An ideal donor journey for email communication starts after the thank you note once she has made the donation. The first step starts with the “Welcome Email” to sending weekly and monthly communication from impact stories, campaign reports, ground stories, CEO communications, etc. Even before you start crafting your user journey list down the different kinds of email communications you would like to send to a donor.
NextAfter divides into two big categories: Cultivation and Solicitation. Cultivation is defined as An email like a story, newsletter, update, video, etc. It could ask you to take an action like volunteer, sign a petition, or advocate for the organization in some way other than donating. And the main purpose of solicitation email is to get you to do something tied to money like donate, purchase a product, or fundraise.
Automating these communications are also the need of the hour. If you can’t automate everything then at least do the trigger emails such as the Thank You and Welcome Emails. Once you have the budgets look to automate these processes by integrating with fundraising software.
Donor retentions
The report states that larger organizations have considerably higher amounts of recurring donors, donations, and total revenue from recurring contributions. For smaller organizations, this presents a strong case for prioritizing this revenue stream as their organization grows. Perhaps donors also feel more confident contributing on a recurring basis when organizations are more established and instill a sense of trust.
Almost every other nonprofit is focusing on recurring donations and it should be the way forward. But just enabling the feature on the donation page or with a third-party app will not motivate the donor to become a recurring donor. The secret lies in how you nurture your donor community with one to one communications.
Once again your donor communication as I shared above is important. The user journeys, deciding on the different ways of email communications all will become an important factor for them to convert into a recurring donor.
The world of online fundraising is complex and the option of recurring donations makes it more complex. Certainly, this feature gives a slight breathing space to Nonprofits but at the same time the questions for a donor is multiplied:
Why should I give to your organization?
And why should I give you monthly or quarterly donations?
Value Proposition is a big thing and if you think you have figured it out then the option for recurring donation should be visible to the donor on your web and mobile. However, it isn’t always the case. I have shared in a previous article about the questions that a nonprofit should ask even before enabling.
Data is important but it is of no use if you can’t make business decisions and implement with your online fundraising activities. Hopefully, it instigates the right questions in your mind with regards to online fundraising.