Website & Landing Pages

Website & Landing Pages transcript

So one of the things that is critically important to all your fundraising is having a good website, especially for monthly giving. You may be having people go there from social media. You may have people going there or to a landing page from an email. Whatever is the page where you’re actually collecting a monthly gift is critically important.

So I’m going to go through fairly quickly some websites and some tips, you can pause the video and look at them more carefully. But one of the things we found is when our our clients, and I guess other organizations as well, have monthly giving occasionally appear on their front home page, that’s really important. So for this campaign for an environmental group in Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation, they took over the homepage. We’ve seen this happen with Mercy Corps and other organizations.

So whatever the reason, people will come to your page, they can see “oh they’re running a campaign around monthly giving.” So if you are running a campaign, that’s the most important time to take over your homepage. So as you can see from this very small organization, a Hospice, they give reasons why a person would want to join their monthly giving program. And one of the things they do here, which I think is really great is they have a piece of writing that says “If you want to give, you can also print out the form.”

There are people who don’t want to make a credit card transaction online, and so even giving them the idea that they could print out the form and send it in is a really important thing to do.

Now, a lot of the examples I’m showing you in these various slides are doing things really well, and sometimes they’re doing things that aren’t as effective. So I’ll try and point some of them out. One of the things this organization does, is say, “Join our email list.” That’s not a really compelling proposition. If they said, “If you want to get our special newsletter to give you tips on how to deal with people who you love, who are dying and take care of them.” That’s something that more people would sign up for then rather “join our email list” because as we all know, we’re all on too many email lists.

Here’s an example of something that every website should have on their donation form page. There’s a couple of different ways you can do this. This one says, ‘submit my secure donation’ and you can also have something like a lock box that indicates ‘this is a site that is protected’ because again, there are a lot of scams out there and people are nervous about it. But in different tasks where you just put anything on the page to make it feel that is more secure, you get a higher conversion rate.

Here’s a great example, wounded Warrior Project is an American organization that has a lot of monthly donors. They recruit them through every channel. So when you go to the donation page for monthly giving, I managed to capture a slide of theirs from a couple of years ago and a more recent one.

As you can see when you compare the two of them, many things have changed. The people who run this program are really smart and so pretty much everything that they’ve changed for the more recent one, which is the one on the right, is something they have tested, and that’s likely made a difference. So as you can see with the cut line on the right running under the photo, it explains how your donation will help so many veterans. And a couple of other really important things they start off asking for the main option clicked as the single gift, but they give you an option on monthly.

And as you can see, there’s a prompt on the newer slide, a monthly giving message encouraging people to become a monthly donor.

You’ll also see that where it says “I could leave this gift in memory in honor of someone” that has moved from a more prone position on the first down below on the second one. And that’s likely because fewer people click that. And you can also see that the dollar amounts have changed from the first one to the second one. So testing dollar amounts on any kind of direct response really critically important thing, especially with monthly giving.

St. Judes obviously has a great monthly giving program, but it’s something that they didn’t have about a decade ago, twelve years ago, and they are now last time I talked to them, making $135,000,000 from monthly donors alone. So an incredible program, great smart fundraisers. So one of the things that’s interesting here is that they’re offering a number of options of ways for people to give not just credit card, but things like PayPal and Amazon pay. So where it says “How often to give” it starts out giving the monthly option. But one time gift is highlighted. And when you click ‘monthly gift’ and go to the second slide, the dollar amounts change from the single gift.

This is a common thing that everybody does, and you should do, and you can see that they start off their monthly gift string with $19 which is almost certainly is what they’re offering as the monthly gift pledge on television. And you can see on the far right, there’s a red box that highlights where you can have a conversation.

I almost missed it the first time, but when you click on that, all of a sudden it pops up whether this is a real person or artificial intelligence. I don’t know because it was well done, and they asked me a question. Now this Karen G could be a robot or might be a real person, but we engage in a little conversation. I’ll go through a couple of these slides to show you how the conversation went.

And then after the conversation with the customer service agent, this three question survey popped up, and again, they’re soliciting feedback to see how that engagement worked. So one of the great things you can do on your landing page or a donation page is to have dollar amounts that specifically say “your money could do this.” So you can see with the Amnesty International example, they’ve got clear examples. Same thing with the Mercy Corps.

You can do this with food banks and many organizations and essentially just basic math. You divide the number of people you are serving by either day or the cost to figure out what kind of calculation makes sense and is appealing to your donors or potential donors. So one of the things you can do on your website is also tell stories of monthly donors how their monthly gift makes a difference to inspire others. This is essentially social proof that shows this is a common thing that people do. It’s a good thing to do, and you’re grateful for that person that becomes a monthly donor.

Another thing to do on your website is have a pop up light box, which essentially is an image that pops up.

Ideally, when people are near ending their time on your site, or if they made a single gift decision, you could pop up a light box and say, “Before you go, Would you consider becoming a monthly donor? Because …” And then you have a short reason why that’s so important. And if you convert, even 5% of the people who have already decided to make a single gift to monthly gifts, that’s an enormous amount of money over time.

It’s really important to have strong copy, a nice design on these and here’s an example if you’ve ever been to The Guardian, one of the most visited websites in the world, this will pop up frequently when these boxes pop up. It’ll slightly distort the back that you’ve been reading or cover over enough of the text that you have to deal with this to go back to reading. But again, the reason organizations use these is because they work.

Exercises for this module

Is your website attracting monthly donors?

Here are a few of Harvey’s tips to ensure you’re maximizing the opportunity to convert people to monthly donors:

• Take over the homepage with monthly giving messaging
• Present reasons why people should give and tell powerful stories
• Explain how the amount you’re asking for will change or save lives with that amount
• Have a nice designed website
• Offer an option to print off a form to deposit money
• Remove any feelings of risk by ensuring the donor that the transactions are secure
• Make the monthly giving payment option present on all donation pages
• Highlight a default payment handle which is the average amount that people usually give
• Have a popup lightbox asking people to become a monthly donor

Review your organization’s website with these strategies in mind, and make note of where your website could be improved.