Optimize, Test, Repeat

Online fundraising isn’t just a “nice to have” addition to your organization’s fundraising activities. It’s a primary driver of overall fundraising success. Nonprofits now recruit more first-time and higher lifetime value donors through the Web, as well as social and mobile media, than through offline channels. And because it raises brand awareness, multiplies campaign response rates and develops a deeper donor relationship, online fundraising also inspires many offline gifts, including multimillion-dollar ones.

Since the cycle of recruiting these new high-value supporters and moving them up the donor pyramid to major gifts and bequests starts with an online donation, nonprofits have to be very effective at online fundraising. They must: 1) ensure a superior experience for the online donor; and 2) continue to optimize that experience through regular testing and analysis.

Too often nonprofits unwittingly interrupt the process of recruiting new online donors and securing those critical first gifts. The problem invariably stems from not having clear online fundraising goals. The results of fuzzy goals are confusing donor experiences and higher donor abandonment. Is your goal to get the most gifts at the highest amount, bring in the maximum number of new donors at any gift level in order to get their e-mail addresses for donor cultivation or verify the effectiveness of your communication program focused on increasing the lifetime value of your relationships? Or is your purpose something else entirely?

Whatever your goal is, make sure everything on your donation page — background information, value proposition, call to action, Web form questions, navigation, etc. — advances the goal and doesn’t complicate gift giving or create “friction.” Examples of friction include asking visitors to jump through unnecessary hoops in the donation process such as sharing their estate commitments, entering solicitor codes so you can properly attribute the gift in your database or following lengthy navigation with too many links. These types of tasks encourage your donors to click away and leave the page.

Friction in the donation process runs off people who could become significant lifetime supporters. To determine whether your organization is creating friction, see “Are You Turning Off Online Donors?” in Fundraising Success’ May issue.

Steps to follow
Once you establish clear goals and eliminate as much friction as possible, measure the donation page’s performance regularly. Without frequent measurement, you can’t determine what’s helping and hurting conversion. Measuring performance is easier than you may think, thanks to free tools that anyone can download and use. You don’t have to be a techie or analytics specialist. Just follow these steps.

First, integrate Google Analytics (or another analytics platform) with your e-commerce system. Here I focused on Google Analytics (basic service) because it is free and intended for marketers vs. webmasters and technologists. This service generates real-time statistics about a website’s audience, traffic sources, content and conversions. With Google Analytics you can determine if your visitors and donors originate from referral sites, direct hits to your site, search engines, e-mail campaigns, social-media networks or mobile devices, allowing you to clearly see what drives the most traffic.

Enable Google Analytics’s Ecommerce Tracking to learn about visitors’ transactions through your site or app, including information about:

• Revenue per donation
• Conversion and abandonment rates
• Average gift
• Time of day
• Message timing
• Spikes in your program, popular giving days, etc.
• A/B testing results

Be sure to implement the tracking code feature and use UTM codes (Google’s version of source codes) on all links in e-mails, banners, social media, etc., which is simple to do with Google URL Builder. This allows you to monitor the success of a particular campaign or other trackable activities.

Second, conduct A/B split testing of your donation page. Commonly used in Web development, marketing and traditional advertising, A/B testing evaluates the performance of two variations of the same content, based on a metric that defines success. The A/B test presents each version of your online giving experience in equal rotations. You then can determine which version is more successful and select that version for ongoing use. Set up your test(s) with Experiments in Google Analytics. (Pro tip: Don’t forget to turn on Ecommerce if you want to track revenue for your experiment for each test, not just conversion.)

Third, validate your test results to a 95 percent level of confidence using a free, downloadable, basic validity tool. A validity tool allows marketers and fundraisers to confirm that test results are mathematically reliable (not a coincidence) and/or to determine that the test is able to deliver a conclusive and repeatable result. These easy-to-use tools make setting up correct sample sizes and understanding the outcomes of testing much more straightforward. Use the results of the test to identify and understand elements to improve your donation process, and continue to build on those for an improved experience.

Faced with high attrition rates, rising acquisition costs and increased competition for the donor dollar, today’s nonprofits must do everything they can to recruit new, high-lifetime-value online supporters and benefit from the positive impact that this has on both online and offline giving. Establish a goal for your donation page, and make sure all aspects of it (content, navigation, etc.) support that goal. As much as possible, get rid of anything that creates friction and is likely to run off potential donors. With easy-to-use tools, continually measure the performance of the page and make adjustments to optimize donor engagement and giving.

Miriam Kagan is senior fundraising consultant at Kimbia. Reach her on Twitter at @MiriamKagan