How to maximise on-site fundraising

From working with creative arts organisations around the UK – especially at this particular cultural and political moment – I’m acutely aware how important fundraising is to our festivals, venues, arts educators and support services.

I’m also aware it’s a massive thorn in the side for fundraisers. While many landed in their roles because of a specific passion for fundraising, probably as many wound up with fundraising responsibilities as a byproduct of a specialist role in marketing, ticketing or digital in general.

In my work supporting web design and development, I’ve helped implement various different approaches to on-site fundraising. The main things I’ve learned is that it pays to be flexible if maximising digital donations is the goal.

Multiple options woven in, not siloed out

Very rarely – but still occasionally – I hear the argument that you don’t want to badger users with donation requests too frequently. And while there’s obviously a limit, I think there’s a long way to go before you reach it.

When you present users with opportunities to support you, by and large they take them. Whether that’s an option to set up a regular donation, or become a member, or add a suggested donation to a purchase, or even just round up a purchase to the nearest pound – or five – presenting the options enables users to easily pick the one that suits them.

It also improves the signposting of fundraising efforts overall. A common challenge I am presented with at the start of a web project is that customers/audiences often don’t know that the organisation is a charity nor how important fundraising is for them. The easiest way to fix that is just to tell people.

So, alongside having multiple ways to make payments, there need to be multiple routes to reach them. We commonly add calls to action for fundraising on websites – whether in the navigation or as a floating element as users scroll – as well weaving them into the user journey. If there’s only one place to donate, reached through multiple clicks that divert users from their original journey, then the chances of them reaching the payment gateway are slim.

Understanding your fundraising platform

A lot of the above is easier said than done. And your ability to do it will depend on your fundraising platform and/or CRM as well as your website infrastructure and/or developer. But despite that, many organisations aren’t using their fundraising systems as efficiently as they could.

Common issues tend to be caused by not using the system to its full extent – “we haven’t sorted our membership offer out yet, but we know we need to!” There may be options to sell gift vouchers or set up membership discounts on site, or assign donations to different funds, that aren’t in use.

Perhaps donations are happening off-site when they could be presented on-page. Or maybe when payments are made, there’s a simple thank you message rather than a proper confirmation page for continuing the user journey, improving tracking at the same time.

It’s worth digging into documentation on your platform and learning what it can do – or, at least, asking your account manager or web developer if they have suggestions about how to use it better.

What do donors get in return?

But it’s not just web platforms that might need to change, the storytelling around fundraising efforts is equally important. As I said earlier, simply making users aware of the need for fundraising is often overlooked. Once they’re aware, there is more you can tell them.

Some of the most effective fundraising efforts I’ve seen have gone the extra mile in giving context and information about why funds are being raised, and what supporters get in return. While we hope audiences love us enough to donate out of pure altruism, the reality is that people appreciate something in return!

Box office discounts are an obvious membership benefit, but can you create special content for members? How about a social element?

With donations, it can be highly effective to explain the specific fund a donation will go to, so donors can feel they are contributing to causes that matter to them. And you could explain what a donation pays for – such as sponsoring a seat. Or simply provide additional context laying out what £100 buys compared with £50, and so on.

Donations or data?

A major bugbear for clients, depending on which donation CRM they use, is the need to be logged into a user account to make payments. It works for tickets as people are willing to log in or create an account for something they want to see, and an account detailing your purchases is standard and handy.

But for donations it’s a roadblock. Even the most charitable person will give up if they have to jump through too many hoops just to make a quick donation.

The advantage of donations coming in via an account is, of course, it means you can build up an invaluable donor database, providing clear donor profiles. But if you’re having a major fundraising push, is that data as important, in that specific moment, as actually raising the funds?

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. It depends how urgent the campaign is. We’ve seen organisations enjoy great success when they’ve offered quick donation routes with a simple payment gateway approved with Google Pay or Apple Pay or PayPal. It’s not an ideal permanent solution but, for short campaigns, it can see donations surge – if you can make peace with losing some of that donor data.

It’s possible to have the best of both worlds. If your platform is API-driven, it’s possible to map payment details onto existing CRM records or create new ones – although it probably needs an experienced developer to build.

Many hands make light(er) work

There are loads of ways to create fundraising opportunities on a website; the more you use, the more success you’ll likely have. Hopefully this has been some help in getting things started.