How your website's U.X. boosts fundraising

Fortunately, the challenge of offering a good supporter experience online is one that charities are well aware of. According to the 2022 Charity Digital Skills report, more than two thirds of charities (68%) say their organisation’s biggest priority over the next 12 months is improving their website, online presence, or social media. 

To that end, here we explore some of the basic principles of how to provide a good user experience on your charity website and how it can boost your fundraising.  

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How user experience affects donations 

The ability to navigate a charity website easily is a vital part of fundraising. The simple fact is, if donating through your website is easy, more people will be inclined to do so.  

Making website navigation easier for your donors comes down to analysing the right data. Charities should use existing data from their website to map common journeys and discover areas where they lose visitors.  

For example, if people are dropping off at your donation page, you can start to think about reasons behind this behaviour. Does it look secure? Is the process too long? These are both significant considerations that will differ from charity to charity. Once charities have this data, they can make informed decisions on what they want to change.  

It is also important for charities to think about accessibility when they think about navigation and supporter experience.

More than 16 million people in the U.K. are living with a disability, many of whom will be your charity supporters or beneficiaries, so, when working with a website designer or content management system (CMS), charities should consider fonts, heading structures, colour contrasts, image descriptions, and much more to make sure their UX suits meets the needs of every visitor.

Providing a good supporter experience is not just about what your website looks like, it’s also about the content. A charity’s content can be written by Shakespeare himself but if it doesn’t tell supporters what they need to know in a clear and simple way, it won’t help boost your fundraising.  

For example, the most common information that donors want to know about a charity is its impact and fundraising efficiency – is their money going to the right places to help the cause they care about? This information should be displayed on a charity’s website obviously and in a dynamic way. A charity website is, in essence, a communication tool – so communicate. 

Furthermore, charities should also tailor their tone-of-voice, as well as their content, to the needs of their audience. The wrong tone-of-voice – it could be too formal or too flippant, it will depend on the charity – can make an organisation seem inauthentic and it can be off-putting to the potential donor. It’s not just what your site looks like and how easy it is to use that’s important in providing a strong UX – it’s what you put onto it too.  

A charity’s website forms a first impression for visiting supporters. How it looks and works can impact how trustworthy a charity is considered to be and, crucially, whether it can be trusted with donors’ hard-earned cash.  

There are many online tools that can help charities build trust with their websites and make them more secure, some of which may already be built into your chosen CMS. For example, CMS provider Umbraco offers a Health Check service, which can show issues that need addressing on your site, such as whether its security and error pages are configurated correctly.