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Donation usability - lessons from the experts 5

Fundraising | Jonathan Waddingham | 17 Apr 2009

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently released a report on donation usability. It’s a must-read for any charity collecting donations online
 
 Here’s the summary of their study of 23 US charity websites:

"User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions."

In layman’s terms – the sites weren’t very clear. And the worst thing was that they hindered the ability, or desire, for users to make a donation. I’m going to focus on the issue of finding out how to donate (not the donation process itself).

The report noted some “donation-killers” - things that caused charities to lose out on donations.

"Amazingly, on 17 per cent of the sites, users couldn't find where to make a donation."

Now, this amazed them. But it doesn’t amaze me. I spend a lot of time looking at charity websites, and it’s often really hard to find out how to donate. Which is just crazy.

At last year’s National Convention, presenters were speaking about the death of the ‘donate now’ button, saying you should replace it with “join us” or “find out more”. They are wrong. And the people listening disagreed too.

There are many different reasons people will visit a website (often called ‘use cases’) and you will want to meet all the different needs of those people. So it’s no good taking away a ‘donate now’ button and replacing it with a ‘find out more’ button. Yes, you will meet the needs of those who might want to find out more, but you’re disregarding the needs of those who want to donate.

And there are people who will just want to donate. They aren’t the *only* people who will visit your website, by any means, but there are some people who will, for whatever reason, just want to give money to you.

Now I’m not advocating the removal of ‘find out more’ or ‘join us’ messages – the web is a really powerful way of getting people engaged and bringing them closer to your organisation, but you still need to make it easy to  donate. And it is possible to do both. Look at Breast Cancer Care’s new website – in the menu they have “Get involved” followed by “Donate”. Two user needs, met. Simple.

At the PF digicomms conference in January, I listened to Bertie Bosredon from Breast Cancer Care talk about how they’d built their new site, and they get it – the site was based on focus groups and research with all areas of the charity, so that they built the relevant use cases for their audience, and could then meet all those different user needs with their new website. It’s a great example.

But if you don’t have the time and resources they do, there is an easy way to get some free user testing that will give you insight into your site’s usability: just grab a friend, relative or even someone off the street, and ask them to try and make a donation to your charity online. If they can’t do it, or it takes an awful long time and loads of clicks, you need to fix your site. And once you’ve got that sorted, you can focus on the story telling, engagement, interactivity, or whatever other use cases you want to meet, safe in the knowledge that anyone who wants to donate, can.

Read Joe Saxton's piece 'The death of 'donate now'?' on Professional Fundraising.

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Who's Who: Jonathan Waddingham