Check Your Online Donor Journey

Solution Factors • March 17, 2025

Check Your Online Donor Journey

The charities I help as a Marketing Consultant often want to increase their online fundraising. Usually, the charity’s cause-related messages are polished and the first 90% of the donor’s journey is slick…

...until it comes to the donation page. Here I usually see at least one blip in the donor journey. This might be caused by fundraising copy on the donation page, poor data collection ethics, or neglecting online security updates.

Check the fundraising copy on your donation page

Sometimes the fundraising copywriter stops writing copy before the end of the donor journey and the donation page is set up by someone with a different skill set. In these instances, one or more of these things usually happen.

Typos and other mistakes appear when the donation page is set up, which undermines donors’ faith in your charity’s competence. This is easily avoided by asking your fundraising copywriter to check your donation page.

Keep the tone of voice in your fundraising copy consistent

Sometimes you will notice a marked change in the tone of voice or the style of charity messages at the end of the donor journey. Again, this is usually because the charity’s fundraising copywriter didn’t write the text in or around the fields of your online donation form.

And this isn’t doesn’t just happen in small charities. While I was consulting for an established national charity, I checked their online donor journey. Their communications and fundraising team were excellent, but online donations had been low for many years. Was this a fundraising trend? No. The fundraising copy messaging swung from being donor-centric to overly demanding on:
• donation amounts and frequency
• the number of charity communication opt-ins

• the amount of data required before the donor could make a payment.

The tone of voice on the donation page changed to something less appealing while the cognitive load on the user increased. It took a fresh pair of eyes to spot this, but once I had read the content of the donation page aloud, the charity’s communications and fundraising team immediately understood how they could improve the content.

What does your donation page’s data collection ethics say about your charity?

Today, people guard their personal information and are often reluctant to enter it all in an online donation form. In terms of fundraising, collecting too much data means it takes longer for a prospective donor to make their first online donation on your website.

Admittedly, I’m normally impatient when making an online donation myself. Inefficient processes sometimes bring my donor journey to a premature end, as I might close the browser before completing it.

I’m always happy to provide my address for Gift Aid, but should charities be also asking for my various phone numbers and email addresses? I don’t mind giving one email address, but any more than that is too much (and doesn’t follow GDPR in terms of data minimisation).

Could you collect less data when somebody gives you their first donation? If you cut back on collecting information such as multiple telephone numbers, this might pave the way for finding out something that might be of more use such as how they heard of you. I’m a fan of collecting data little and often.

Is your online donor journey easy?

When I’m wearing my Charity Marketing Consultant hat, I always check how good a charity’s online fundraising is by quietly following the donor journey to the end. Often, the donor journey is easy, but sometimes it’s almost impossible.

Here’s my favourite example. I was trying to make an online charity donation as a memorial. As well as having to fill in too many unnecessary fields (against both my will and GDPR) and completing 14 captcha tests due to a fault on the website, I received various warnings because the online transaction facility had not been kept up to date. I called my bank, which confirmed that the charity had let its website’s donation pages fall too far below recommended security levels. In other words, they had not applied security updates.

Nobody in senior management, or the fundraising and communications team, was aware of this.

These are just a few real-world examples of the impact that mistakes can have on donor journeys. If you run a charity and would like me to check your donor journey, contact me.

Need help?

If you’d like a chat, please email info@solutionfactors.com and we’ll arrange a call.

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