Top 3 Actions. Part 3: Forms

In our previous entry, you learned a bit more about why your donate button should go straight to a donation form. But what use is an amazing donation button that leads straight to a questionable donation form? In this entry, we will take a quick look at best practices for donation forms themselves, centered around simplification and limiting donor distractions.

The highest-converting donation forms have two items in common: 1) the minimal required number of fields and 2) a limited number of potential distractions.

First, let’s touch on the minimum required number of fields. What does that mean? Let’s put this in the context of a story. After speaking with a friend who is also a member of their local station, Barbara is getting ready to make a $100 add gift. She is on the form and notices one of the fields requested is a member card number, for existing members. Barbara gets up from her desk and hunts around in her wallet to search for the card, with no luck. She moves to the bedroom and begins hunting through her nightstand. While she’s doing that, the dog starts barking to go out for its nightly walk. While putting the leash on the dog, Barbara closes the laptop, figuring she will “get back to it later.” Ask yourself — what are the odds she will actually get back to it later? Is it worth risking those odds to get her member card number?

We see a similar situation in which John is making a donation to a station with both radio and TV and runs into a question asking which station the donation is supporting. Since he and his wife both love Public Media, he doesn’t want to make the decision without her, so he pauses the donation to ask. Or perhaps he is single and is thinking about his decision when the doorbell rings, pulling him away from the donation. Either way, the odds of the donation being completed just dropped dramatically over a single question. Now imagine your form has multiple questions that are not required to complete the donation!

For every field or question on a donation form, ask yourself: is the potential value of asking this question worth risking the donation? Is the incremental benefit of that knowledge worth risking $60, $120, $250 or more? The fact is that each question you ask reduces your conversion rate. It varies by station and question, but overall creates a reduction.

One recent study by Vital Design demonstrated a 47% drop in conversion rates when a field was added asking for a phone number. In this example, the form was for a free e-book, so there was not even a financial commitment. Now I am not saying you should NOT ask for a phone number from a donor, but it does demonstrate the impact. If you have a field that drops your donation conversion rate by 5% and you get 100 online donations a month, that means you are now only receiving 95. If you have an average donation of, say, $60, that one field is costing you $300 a month or $3,600 a year in net revenue. If any of those variables increase, average gift, percentage impact, etc., the impact of that one field can drive significant loss of revenue! Ultimately, you must have a plan and solid reason for any field you are asking for beyond those required to process a donation. If you’d like to ask a question and you have an entire revenue stream and strategy built around that additional question, by all means, ask away. But if you don’t, please contemplate if that question is worth the revenue you are risking!

Good Number of Fields:

Better Number of Fields:

Best Number of Fields:

An additional concern for many is other distractions on the page. While this has lessened over the years, it is still worth mentioning. A donation page that has a right rail filled with other information is a massive distraction. Even your website navigation itself can be a distraction. If you have the ability, I strongly suggest removing the menu from the donation page. A simple “back to the main page” or something along those lines will suffice for people who would like to return to your homepage. The easier you make it to leave the page, the greater the number of potential donors who will do just that. Often, they will mean it unintentionally — a graphic or item will grab their attention and away they go! We know that you will often have pressure to promote the numerous priorities your station has — programming, events, etc., but the donation page is NOT the time to promote those priorities. The donation page exists to “close the deal” with a donor — it is not the time to open a new conversation!

As we wrap up this entry, I would like to mention an item that somewhat falls into both the “distraction” and “too many fields” category: usage of a captcha — those tools that require you to click on an endless supply of bicycles or stoplights until it is convinced you are human. To be clear, captchas have their place preventing fraud. But it has been said, “captchas don’t stop bots, they stop customers,” and that is somewhat true — at least when deployed at all times. If your form is not currently being attacked by fraudsters, that quote is accurate. The vast majority of people prevented from processing a transaction on your form are likely donors, not bots. In short, having a captcha present on your form at all times will lessen the revenue you make, while not increasing the revenue you save from fraud.

There are donation solutions however, such as Jackson River Springboard, which CDP uses as our donation platform, that ONLY insert a captcha on the form while it is being attacked. The system actively monitors credit card attempts, and when it begins to see suspicious activity, it will add a captcha to the form until the potential fraud attempts drop below a pre-determined point. This is the best of both worlds — fraud protection when you need it and easy form completion when you don’t. If you are going to utilize a captcha, this is the only way to go.

I hope you have enjoyed this brief series of blog entries. I hope you have been able to make at least a change or two, based on these entries, to increase your conversion rate. Truth be told, these items are just scratching the surface – they are the “low hanging fruit” as it were. I note that because as you move forward in experimentation and optimization of your donation experience, all those gains will not be as obvious! Rather than a 10% increase in conversion you may receive a .25% increase – the important thing to note is that those small gains add up over time.

The good news is that CDP is constantly looking at those small changes. We are always working hard to determine which small changes DO add up and have an ROI that make it worth the time to implement. Whether you are a CDP Partner Station or not, I hope you will continue to follow our research and data to help your fundraising grow! As a quick closing reminder – if you are curious how you compare to others in your fundraising, check out our new ROAR 2.0 report (still free!)  to get a better idea of where you are doing great and where you could improve. This page has additional information, and should you submit your info, someone will contact you.