Do you have a compelling cause? Are you looking for a way to boost your online giving?
Does your nonprofit organization solicit donations through email campaigns?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your transition to a responsive donation page cannot wait any longer. Here are three solid reasons a responsive donation page is a must for your organization:
Your donors are here today, gone tomorrow.
According to DonorDrive.org’s 2015 Report on the State of Peer-to-Peer Fundraising, “85% of donations happen on the same day the donor first visits a fundraising page.” This means that you may only get one chance to convert a visit into a donation. If a donor arrives at your page and is then forced to pinch and zoom to fill out a form, they may not stick around long enough to click the “Submit” button.
According to DonorDrive.org’s 2015 Report on the State of Peer-to-Peer Fundraising, “85% of donations happen on the same day the donor first visits a fundraising page.” This means that you may only get one chance to convert a visit into a donation. If a donor arrives at your page and is then forced to pinch and zoom to fill out a form, they may not stick around long enough to click the “Submit” button.
In fact, according to Exposure Ninja, research shows that sites that are not mobile-friendly experience a bounce rate of 65-70% on mobile devices. That’s 25-30% higher than the average bounce rate of desktop sites. This means, that your donors are leaving the page within only seconds of arrival, when using a mobile device.
Micro gifts and impulse giving is an effective means of gaining new supporters.
Think about the donations you’ve given to both individuals and organizations in the past. Have you ever been compelled to give a small gift at a moment’s notice? Chances are, if the cause was compelling enough, and you were only asked to give a small amount of money, you probably didn’t have to invest too much time thinking it over. Micro giving campaigns can buy you a multitude of new contacts because of the fact that donors can give quickly and easily without investing a prohibitive amount of time or money.
If you use a responsive donation page, your donors can give to this type of campaign while riding a bus, or waiting in line at the grocery store, or waiting for a friend to meet up for dinner. For example, let’s say a user comes across a particularly moving video you posted on YouTube. In that moment, he decides to give $10.00 to your cause. If he arrives at a page that is not easily accessible from the mobile device he used to watch the video, he may not remember to come back later. Sadly, although your content may have been persuasive enough to incite the user to give, the process of working through your donation page would have required more time and frustration than he was willing to invest in the $10.00 donation. If you multiply that $10.00 by the number of users who will experience this same frustration and leave your page without donating, the loss could be devastating for your campaign.
You might be missing out on potential donations from half of your email recipients.
Have you ever thought about the leverage you have with email campaigns? Not only do you have direct access to a potential donor’s inbox, but you have access to someone who’s likely opted in to receive your messages. This means that your message is not only being seen, but it’s being seen by someone who is interested in your cause, and may have even made a donation in the past. According to the Experian “Quarterly email benchmark report” (Q1 2015), 50 percent of all emails are opened on an Android, iPhone, or iPad. If you are relying on a large volume of donations to come from these types of campaigns, you need to be sure your page is accessible for the 50 percent of users who will open them on a device other than a PC.
For more helpful tips regarding responsive donation pages, check out our post on year-end giving here.