Tag Archives: online donations

Jakob Nielsen on Non-Profit Web Site Usability

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No one knows more about usability than Jakob Nielsen;  he recently tested nonprofit web sites and found that much can be done to optimize online giving.  Major points:

  1. nonprofit web sites are good at attracting new donations but less so in ‘sustaining long term donor relationships’
  2. potential donors primarily want information on the organization’s mission, objectives and work as well as how it uses donations but few nonprofits provide this information prominently on their home page, where many constituents begin (and may end) their research
  3. donations are discouraged by usability problems relating to page /site design and by poor content not optimized for the web

Not to my surprise, Jakob also mentioned how poorly large affiliate based organizations integrate national web sites with local chapter sites, saying that most looked ‘completely different’ from the main web pages.  At my organization, we provide templates to insure some level of consistency, but there still isn’t enough coordination to insure consistency with our national site.

This report shows the value of doing actual user testing, not just asking others in your nonprofit what they think users want.  Don’t wait until you’re ready to do a full web site redesign, which for many of us may not happen very often.  Use inexpensive tools such as 4Q and SurveyMonkey to learn how your web site can be improved.

Jakob’s full report is available here.

New Findings About Online Giving

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The recently released donorCentrics™ Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis offers many interesting insights about online giving.   Steve MacLaughlin’s blog offers  a good summary of its major findings.  My comments are below:

  • online giving continued to grow rapidly in 2007 & 2008, even though there were fewer natural disasters which stimulated past years’ contributions – many of us take this for granted, but online giving is still relatively small compared to direct mail giving.
  • online donors give larger gifts than ‘traditional’ donors but have slightly lower retention rates – why are we losing donors’ loyalty?  Is it too easy to opt out of email communications?
  • while online giving is an important source for new donor acquisition, online donors may not be cultivated to their full potential after acquisition – this is an important point;  using a ‘welcome series’ of communications works much better than simply adding someone to an email newsletter list.
  • online donors often migrate to other channels, especially direct mail – I’ve long advocated the value of multichannel marketing, but it’s still interesting to find out that many will start online than give offline.  When I asked long term fundraising expert Michael Johnston recently to predict how much longer direct mail would survive, he confirmed that it would be quite a while yet.
  • direct mail donors rarely give online – so while online donors will go offline, offline donors usually won’t contribute online?  This was a surprise for me.

Twenty-four nonprofit organizations participated in this study, released by Target Analytics.  Interestingly, the headline of a NY Times article summarizing the study read Study Shows First-Time Online Donors Often Do Not Return. Clearly, we’re still figuring out what works but CARE’s Tobias Smith offered an interesting perspective, suggesting that we be “less worried about what channels donors use and offer them a variety of channels through which they can give.”  So if anyone tells you to focus only your efforts online when seeking new constituents, remind them that it’s too early to phase out traditional methods, such as direct mail.  Personally, I rarely pay much attention to direct mail, but many of our supporters still do.