Click here to donate - understanding what's wrong with online engagement today.

At the Third Sector Digital Communication and Social Media Convention, Simon Smith and

Jens Sorensen from GOSS presented the stream titled "Click here to donate - understanding

what's wrong with online engagement today."

Additional resources:

http://www.gossinteractive.com/blog/third-sector-digital-communications-and-social-media-convention-day-1

http://www.gossinteractive.com/blog/third-sector-digital-communications-and-social-media-convention-day-2

@RobmDyson: #nfpsm & the @gossinteractive boys are off- nice, quick, run-

through of importance of testing websites re copy, content & colours #sem5

@charitychap: There is no silver bullet, say @GOSSInteractive, but the great

thing about the web is you can try different things for layout. #nfpsm

As part of the Convention, delegates were asked to take part in a survey to benchmark their use of

social media and digital communications. The survey is still open, but the interim results were

presented on the morning of the second day by Rob McCarthy, CEO, GOSS.

One of the key findings showed that the majority of charities claim to collect less than 5% of their

donations online. This seemed very low, but further research by web analytics demystified indicates

that less than 2% of traffic that comes to a charity website are likely to donate.

Once the scene was set, the GOSS stream focused on the issue of low onsite donations and revealed

the process of how charities could increase the amount of donations through the web by defining and

developing the following process:

1. User personas - Understand your visitors

2. Intelligent analysis - Find out what they are doing

3. Test and refine - Improve the user journey

User personas

Without an understanding of your target audience it's very difficult to present information which will

appeal to them. You can run focus groups which, whilst quite expensive can be effective but their

constrained environment can mean that participants may not necessarily say what they mean and

they are always only ever going to cover a small cross section.

A more credible alternative is to understand your website visitors by developing a series of user

personas. This allows you to get an understanding of all the different people who are likely to visit

your site and the information you need to present to them to increase their likelihood to donate.

Each of the above user personas has their own story, motivation and resources that they can give

(time, money, expertise). This session was predominantly about increasing the amount of donations

through the website and as Emma and Craig were willing to give time to the charity their limited

disposable incomes meant that they would not be donating money. Therefore, in this example we are

focusing on the targets of Michael, Rita and Rob.

Intelligent analysis

Once you have identified the users and their needs you can then go on to understand what's

happening on the site. One of the most effective and cheapest ways is to leverage your web analytics

package. Although there is a huge amount of information available in these packages, we want to

separate the 'what is happening' from the 'why it's happening', because this will give us the insight to

make effective decisions on increasing the small percentage that currently donate (the former, just

describes the things that are nice to know but doesn't tell us how to improve).

By mapping out the journey a user must go through in our

order to donate we can see how effective the current journey to donation is. We can see from the

example that a huge amount of visitors are entering the first step of our journey (6,437). As they go

down each step of the process more and more visitors fall out of the process. This could be for a

number of reasons including ineffective messaging, no clear call to action or the site and its content

seems untrustworthy (especially for less known charities). It is therefore imperative to take each of our

personas and see if their specified journey is effective.

Test and refine

Now that you have an understanding of the people that are likely to donate online and what visitors

are currently doing on your site, the next step is to evaluate the previous two steps. 

Was their journey effective and would therefore tweaking the messaging, copy or call to actions make

the site more effective? Or will you need to go back and redefine the journey, message and content

because visitors don't engage with your site? If the latter, you will inevitably have to revisit the site as

part of an overall website redesign. However, if it is the former you should be able to tweak your site

to increase the number of conversions.

This tweaking or 'squeezing out the last drop' involves testing different elements on a page in order to

see if it can be made more effective. This is best done through multivariate testing which allows you to

show different versions of the page to the visitors of your website and then unknowingly to them you

can find out what version is most effective at getting visitors to donate.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you want to increase the amount of visitors that donate on your website, you firstly

need to understand what people want from your website (user personas), followed by understanding

which pages are failing to engage on your site (Intelligent analysis). This will then give you the

knowledge to test elements of your site, refine them and help to increase the amount of donations you

receive.

GOSS are experts at usability and user experience, landing page optimization and

understanding funnels to increase your conversion rates.

Posted by Jens Sorensen, 20th June 2011