How to Increase Your Nonprofit’s Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete an action, like make a donation, or signup for your newsletter. If you have a high conversion rate, your marketing is working. If your conversion rate is not where you’d like it to be, there are some things you can do to improve it!

Strong Value Proposition

Your value proposition is a statement that explains why someone should donate, for example. Your value proposition needs to be clear and reflect what impact donations have on the cause. Putting your value proposition front and centre is key to catching people’s attention fast. Invisible Children has a strong value proposition right on their donate page.

Goal-focused content

Each page of your website needs to support the overall goal. For example, at the end of a blog post, encourage visitors to join your mailing list or on your partner’s page, invite others to partner with you.

Donor Personas

If you want to convert donors, you have to cater to different “donor personas.” Some website visitors might be first time donors, while others might be interested in monthly giving, want to learn more, or become a peer-to-peer fundraiser. Creating easy-to-access information for these different types of donor personas will help improve you conversion rate. Charity: water does a great job of this on their website.

Forms

Shorter forms always convert better than longer forms. Try to limit fields to 3-5 for best results. If you don’t need to ask for a phone number, then don’t. One study found that removing phone number from their form increased conversion by 47%.

Call-to-action (CTA)

Spend time formulating a good CTA. Research suggests that 90 percent of people who read your headline will also read your CTA. Make sure your call is short and to the point. Here’s a great example from Mercy for Animals.

Easy Donating

Making it easy to donate can make a big difference. A bright-colored donation button in the header of your website that links to a simple donation form is the way to go. And, as always, avoid these mistakes!

Make sure to check back to see how the changes you’ve made impacted your conversion rates! Many organizations get started with a basic user analyzing tool, such as Google Analytics and a conversion analytics tool like KISSMetrics.