When is the last time you sat down and analyzed your donation page completion rates - meaning the number of people who clicked to your donate page from an online fundraising appeal but did not complete the donation? And when you looked at the results was the abandonment rate high or low? High incompletion rates is a big clue that something is wrong your donation-landing page.
During the Care2 webinar The Overachiever’s Guide to Online Fundraising panelists Alia Mckee of Sea Change Strategies, Dionna Humphrey of Greenpeace International and Eric Rardin of Care2 discussed nine steps to kick start your 2012 online fundraising. The steps include:
Testing and optimizing your donation forms to include only the essential you information you need to process the donation. You should also consider suppressing your global navigation. Adding pertinent information such as your address, phone number, and privacy policy is important too, because it demonstrates that you are a legitimate nonprofit.
- Send new donors a special welcome message.
- Thank your donors multiple ways – by email, phone and handwritten letters.
- Review and optimize your traffic. How are donors finding your organization online when you look at your Google Analytics?
- Get to know your supporters and show them that you really understand whom they are. Your donors are special people and they should be treated as VIP’s.
- Tell good stories that appeal to your donors emotions.
- Grow your list to keep ahead of the average unsubscribe rates which are 0.23%, according to the 2011 eNonprofit Benchmark Study.
You can listen to the webinar here and check out the slides below