Why Your Non-Profit's Website Isn't Converting Donors, and How to Fix It

This ended up being a much longer article than I intended — conversion funnels are a huge topic. If you're in a time crunch, scan through the headings to see the specific issues and fixes I recommend. If you have any questions, I'm just an email away.

Origin and meaning

"Conversion" is a term from e-commerce. Imagine you are an e-commerce company. Your goal, whenever someone visits your site, is to get them to buy something. Of course, as much as you might wish for it, this won't happen as soon as they land on your site.

They first need to:

1. Search for something
2. Click on a search result
3. Learn about the item
4. Evaluate the item against other options (including not buying it at all)
5. Add it to the cart
6. Enter their payment information
7. Enter their billing information
8. Click "Buy Now"

Each of these steps is a phase, and "conversion" means moving from one phase to another. While it can apply to change between any two phases, the moment people most often refer to when saying "convert" is the purchase action. It's when a potential customer converts into an existing customer.

When looked at as a whole, these steps are called a conversion funnel. It's inevitable that some percentage of people will fall out of each step, but the more that a business optimizes their funnel, the more people make it from the beginning to the end and buy a product. The main goal for most e-commerce companies is to optimize their funnels.

What are you selling?

You may not have any products, but you're definitely selling something. For you, conversion is when someone who knows about your cause and cares about your mission goes through the friction-filled effort of entering their payment information to click the donate now button.

It would be unreasonable to expect a potential customer to purchase an item without seeing how it will benefit them. Why would we expect any different from potential donors?

Donors, just like customers, need to go through a thoughtful, well-designed funnel before they can be expected to donate.

Let's go through the main problems you might face, one by one.

This is called the "top of the funnel" or the "awareness phase". It's the period where potential donors first hear about you. The top of the funnel is especially important because it feeds every other step. Not only does success here mean more people convert, but it also means higher throughput, which gives your analytics more granularity, and lets you experiment with your funnel faster and more frequently.

More people coming to your site means you can optimize your funnel faster.

Awareness can be generated through many mediums: word-of-mouth, billboards, advertisements, organic search, the list goes on. We'll focus here on organic web searches — googling it.

How to tell if this is a problem

You can tell this is an issue if your site doesn't get many visitors. You can also look at your analytics platform to see how your website is performing with your target search terms. If nobody sees your site in the first place, then it doesn't matter how well your site converts donors.

How to fix it

This is where SEO comes in. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. There are a lot of elements to consider here, but the key ones are:

• Make sure your site has the right foundational elements. It should have structured metadata that Google knows how to read, including information about your organization, contact information, and location/hours if applicable.
• Accessibility is important in its own right, but it also matters for SEO. Make sure your site passes WCAG AA or better, and your SEO will improve.
• Optimize your load speeds. A website that loads fast, even on mobile with a sub-optimal data connection, will perform better in rankings than one that doesn't.
• Check your content. A blog, well-written landing pages, and consistent use (but not overuse) of keywords all help here.

Creating clear communications about what your organization actually does can be challenging. On the one hand, you don't want to overwhelm with too much detail. On the other hand, donors often do not have enough context to understand everything you do without being walked through it step-by-step.

How to tell if this is a problem

Get a few people who are not connected to your work to help here. The closer they are to your target donor in terms of context and behavioral patterns, the more accurate this will be. Ask them to read through your website. Make sure not to cue them with any information ahead of time. Remember, you're trying to evaluate how well your website speaks for itself, not how well you communicate your mission.

When they finish reading, ask them if they can describe the main points of what you do in their own words. You want a clear, short, unconfused response. One to two sentences is best. More than that, and you likely have some messaging work to do.

How to fix it

First, ask yourself, can you describe what your organization does in one or two concise sentences? If you can't, it's no surprise that your participants can't. This is important, foundational work that matters for more than just your website. It can help you prioritize your efforts and clarify your activities. Remember, this is about the tactical activities your organization does. Don't worry about communicating why this matters. That's the next step.

If you do have a strong statement of what you do, but your participants still can't communicate it, then revisit your website's content. You likely aren't laying things out clearly enough. For each piece of content, ask what job it's doing. Do you have a page dedicated to communicating what your organization does? Is it easy to find? Is the content on that page communicating clearly, concisely, and concretely what you do? Try including your clearly written statement verbatim, early on that page.

Iterate on your content, and ask a new set of people. Repeat this process until you're consistently getting responses that match your one-to-two sentence description.

Think back to the last time you did some online shopping. You probably looked at a few product pages and asked yourself if the thing you were looking at was worth the money. In marketing terms, you were evaluating the benefit. You were asking if this would improve your life in some way that would be worth more than the money you were going to spend. Donors make the same choice, and it's vital to evaluate whether you're selling your organization effectively.

How to tell if this is a problem

There are two main indicators that this is a problem. The first is whether or not you have an intentional funnel design. If you don't know what you want your potential donors to look at to get them to care about your organization, that's a problem. The second is instrumentation. If you're not measuring how many people are going from your informational content to your motivational information, then you can't tell how well any of this content is performing.

How to fix it

The most important thing here is content. Think about this potential donor. What would make them care about your mission? Do they need data? Maybe they need personal stories to humanize the issue. Perhaps they need more context or social proof. Dig into what matters to them, and do a small experiment. Create a specific page just for one of those ideas. It's important to isolate variables, so you know what content is the most effective at convincing donors to contribute to your cause.

Content on its own is not enough. Intentional funnel design and analytics become especially important here. Add some links to your experimental content and measure what percentage of people click through. Once this is instrumented, you can experiment with different content and see which messaging best moves people from "I know what this does" to "I know why this matters".

Each of your "I know why this matters" pieces of content should include links to your donations page. That click-through is the biggest measure of whether or not people care enough about what you do.

The percentage of people who click through to your donations from your "why it matters" content will tell you if you're doing a good enough job at this phase.

As with each of these phases, continue experimenting and iterating. This will never be done — it'll only get better.

This is the product your potential donors are actually buying. This is probably the most important thing in this article, so let me say it again.

The specific impact of their donation is the product donors are actually buying.

All of the work you've done so far is setting up this moment for your potential donors, where they have a clear understanding of what your organization does, why that matters, and how their donation specifically will help.

How to tell if this is a problem

This really comes down to analytics. Are people clicking the big donate button? Are they donating at your desired level? If your website is intended to gather many small donations, but you're only getting the occasional large donation, that tells you something is off about this stage in the funnel. If lots of people are getting to this point, but not many are actually donating, that lets you know you have an issue.

How to fix it

Experiment with your call to action — the copy you use to ask them to donate. This includes text leading up to your donate button, as well as the text on the button itself. Maybe it's not urgent enough, or strikes the wrong tone. Change it and watch to see if it results in an uptick.

Alternatively, you can try experimenting with the format of your donation request. A common pattern is to provide a few donation levels, and indicate what that amount of money provides for the organization. A donation of $50 might get two weeks of food for a person in your program. A donation of $500 might fund a rally in a not-yet-covered precinct. Consider your previous learnings about what gets your potential donors to care about your cause, and invoke those elements here.

Everyone hates forms. Everyone. Unfortunately, your donors will have to fill out at least some form after they decide to donate. They'll have to enter a credit card number, or their name and address. Amazon has spent years streamlining this process, because they know that even someone who has decided to purchase can fall out of the funnel at this point.

After they've decided to donate, it's vital to minimize friction as much as possible.

If they perceive the purchase flow as time-consuming, onerous, or otherwise unpleasant, they might decide they'll come back and do it tomorrow. Tomorrow turns into next week. Next week turns into someday. Someday turns into never. Your goal is to make it easy to finish donating today, right now.

How to tell if this is a problem

Make a donation yourself. Document the experience end-to-end. Ask yourself, "what took a long time?" Count the number of fields you have to fill in, the number of pages you have to go through, and the number of clicks it takes to complete. Ask yourself, "after each step in the process, what would I expect to happen next?" Was there some indicator in the purchase flow that told you what to expect? Your donors don't have your context, so they probably won't see things as clearly as you do.

Be critical, and go through the process with a fine-toothed comb.

Look at your analytics here too. What percentage of people who decide to donate actually complete a donation? If this is a low number, you've got a problem.

How to fix it

If you have control over the way the flow is built, great! You can fix the issues you identified. That's uncommon, though. Most organizations work with a third-party payments platform. Give them a list of the issues you've noticed and ask when they'll be addressed. They are incentivized to continue improving their product, so they'll likely be willing to discuss this with you. If you can, get in touch with a product manager on the team who manages the checkout flow. They have the power to prioritize fixes to the experience.

If your payments platform has a lot of issues and doesn't address them quickly, it may be time to look at other payment platforms. Each platform has its pros and cons. I'll be covering the best options in a later post.

Funnels are a huge topic, and most major e-commerce companies have entire teams of people dedicated to monitoring, experimenting, and updating theirs. Yours doesn't have to be perfect, but there are specific small steps you can take today to improve donations to your cause. Of course, you may have read this article and thought "that makes sense, but I already have zero time."

If you recognized some of these issues in your own site, and would like some help addressing them, shoot me a message. I'd be happy to do a consultation and see if I can help your organization.