Are people truly Altruistic? Tips for donating online

For some businesses particularly nonprofit organisations generating donations is the key to their success. These businesses have revenue that comes purely from donors so just like an ecommerce site has products to sell for their business to operate, they have donations to receive.

So do people donate online and how do you increase the amount of donations you receive? Recently reading about behavioral economics has made me think about donations and weather people truly are altruistic. Do people really give money to get nothing in return or is there a sense of recognition, self-satisfaction or even worse a product they expect to receive in return for their donation? The book recognized the United States as being one of the most open-handed countries in the world, donating billions of dollars every time a natural disaster occurs. Often these donations were by anonymous donors and contained large sums of money. At face value an anonymous donation of thousands of dollars would appear to be altruistic however when you look further into it this is up for question. The United States has one of the most generous tax return systems for donations than any other country, the government refunds far out way the rest of the world. This could potentially explain why Americans are so quick to reach into their pockets and donate to charities.

Regardless of this, it does not hurt to promote the things that a person may get in return for a donation form of your website, true altruism will simply ignore these and donate anyway. Below are a couple of tips for online donation forms.

1. Reduce form fields: the less fields the better
2. Reduce mandatory fields: if you don’t NEED this information then don’t force the user to enter it. Ideally the only mandatory fields would be Credit card and price, anything else is extra information that the user may not want to fill in. (Don’t forget there are people who donate anonymously)
3. Put messages around tax receipts: remembering that majority of large donations will be claimed on tax so why not reassure the user that an automatic tax invoice will be sent to them
4. Take pay pal: Pay pal increases conversion. It is trusted and convenient and people recognize it. It is going to cost your web developer a little more to integrate with this but it will be worth it in the long run
5. Take Credit Card: may seem obvious but don’t make Pay pal the only option
6. One step forms: don’t make people go through multiple steps to give you their money, take it on the first step.
7. Newsletter segmentation: include a newsletter checkbox that no only hooks into an EDM platform (such as Mailchimp) but make sure the data is segmented based on the donation value. You want to be able to target the people based on their previous donation amount
8. Testimonials: putting some testimonials or real life examples of what their money will do on the form will increase conversion. E.g. every $10 will fund X days of research
9. Large buttons: make sure the donate button is large and informative, simply having a small “submit” button won’t convert as well as a large button saying “donate now”