Pre-populate your donation form fields and you will give your donor less reasons not to complete their initial intention to give.
You can pre-fill your donation form from:
- An email click through
- A facebook post ask (if you set some location or demographic information – not name & email)
- A donation widget on a previous webpage (your site or another).
Less than 7 fields on your donation form
Of course you want to keep your donation form very brief – research from HubSpot shows that if you keep your form to as few fields as possible because there is a significant drop off rate after the first 3 fields (usually personal info – which if is pre-populated means the user at least continues with the form for longer) and then again after 7 fields. You definitely want less than 10 fields otherwise the drop off rate is considerable. You have about 6 seconds for the supporter to scan the page before they decide if they’re going to hit the back button.
Know your supporters behaviour
Using tools like mouseflow on my website, which gives you a video snapshot of each user session on your website, shows that most of our users land on the page, scroll to the bottom (to see how long the article is) and then back to the top and start reading and the drop off rate depends on their level of interest to invest in the article – and if they do have the time, then it depends if the content meets their needs.
But there is no exact rule.
There are always organisations who do everything you’re not supposed to and convert well. The content you’re using on your donation page, as well as the communication that was used to drive the supporter to it, have a massive impact that is difficult to quantify for one organisation, let alone a whole sector.
Make it easy for the donor
You just need to make it as easy as possible for the donor to complete the donation. And pre-populating the form fields will go a long way to assisting with improving your donation form conversion rate.
To pre-fill your donation forms, you need to use your email click through URL to pass the user’s information through to the donation form – called a parametre.
A parametre might look like this baseURL?variable1=value&variable2=value
You use this same kind of URL parametre information when clicking from a previous form or to track any specific online advertising channel.
You can also use personalisation of the name on the thank you page. It just makes the donor feel good.