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How to Increase Donations for Nonprofits

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The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedMar 20222 min read

Donations are the fuel that drives nonprofits, but asking people to part with their money is no easy task. Many charities are regularly underfunded, with the recent pandemic only making things worse. With charity and fundraising events largely off the agenda, charities have been tasked with optimising their presence online – including their payment solutions – to capture their audience’s attention and boost donation rates.

In this post, we’ll look at how to increase donations for nonprofits, especially when it comes to online and social media.

How to increase online donations

Your charity’s website – along with all your other online touchpoints – play an essential role when it comes to raising donations. It’s essential to get things right and optimise the donation experience for potential donors.

Here are some tips you can use to increase online donations:

Use the same fonts, colours and tone of voice across your website and other online platforms. This will help become a familiar and trusted brand. Use the same messaging across all online touchpoints.
Use calls to action (CTAs) on your donation and fundraising pages and make donation buttons prominent.
Make it easy for people to find the information they want and ensure that donating online is a frictionless experience (i.e., one that doesn’t involve too many clicks or long forms to fill in). To speed things up, allow individuals to donate without having to set up an account.
Asking donors to sign up for recurring donations is a good way to ensure you receive regular donations, without having to do any additional marketing. Use a payment processor like GoCardless to help donors set up direct debits.

Make it easy for people to find your site by using SEO techniques to rank highly on the search engine results page (SERP). Create relevant content and make sure it uses the right keywords.

Social media fundraising can get you a big return on investment as long as you use it strategically. Take into account who you’re planning to reach on social media, and the objectives you want to achieve. Facebook is the most popular social media network in the world, while Twitter tends to be used by Millennials (those born in the 1980s to 1990s). Younger people are more active on places like Instagram and Snapchat.

In order to succeed with social media fundraising, you’ll need to know which groups make up your supporter base so you can decide which platforms are the best for you to use.

When you’re posting on social media, write about topics your audience will relate to and find interesting.
Post when our audiences are most likely to be receptive (for example on evenings and weekends).
Don’t give people the ‘hard sell’ when you’re posting – give them something of value in return.
Consider paid advertising on social if your budget allows for it.
Make sure to link your social pages to your website, or anywhere else you have a presence online.

WooCommerce donation tip checkout makes it easy to collect donations

Using a dedicated charity donation software (like Donorbox) or a plugin (for example, the one provided by WooCommerce), helps you provide a more frictionless way of collecting donations online.

WooCommerce has a plugin that allows you to accept donations via card payments. You can build a custom landing page with text and select a layout of your choice. Then, you can embed ‘products’ - or ‘donations’ on your page, so donors can choose them, and add them to their basket. Donors can then use their card to check out, without leaving the page – or your website.

You can display presets for the donation amounts you want to collect, e.g., £5, £10 and so on. You can also take donations and sell products on your site using the WooCommerce donation tip checkout plugin (i.e., you may decide to sell a branded T-shirt or raffle tickets).

How to increase donations as a nonprofit organisation

There are many strategies you can use to increase donations for your fundraising campaigns, some will be more relevant to your nonprofit organisation than others. Whichever channels you use, it’s important to offer donors a streamlined experience when they’re making payment.

We can help

GoCardless helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of admin your team needs to deal with when chasing invoices. Find out how GoCardless can help you with ad hoc payments or recurring payments.