5 Big Ideas for Online Giving

With the right strategy and the smartest new tools, digital giving is a win-win: easy for donors and effective for you. The good news is that going all in with online giving is getting easier, with intuitive technology and significant cost-savings. Test out these five tips and tech upgrades to start seeing big results for your online giving program.

1. Roll out a brilliant new donation form.

You can make giving feel great for your donors with a compelling, easy-to-use, mobile-first donation form. The most effective forms spark generosity by design:

•  Pack a visual punch with your branding and powerful images

• Present a clear call to action with intelligent gift amounts

• Provide a portal where donors can manage their giving

• Offer a range of payment options: PayPal, Venmo, ApplePay, GooglePay, and digital wallets

“Optimized forms reduce the steps needed to create a really cohesive, brand-compliant, consistent, and compelling campaign donation page,” said Alex Day of Washington’s National Park Fund, which registered a 40% increase in donations with Blackbaud’s innovative Online Giving Forms.

2. Automate the ask for recurring gifts.

Intelligent donation forms highlight a recurring gift option to encourage one-time donors to give monthly. This means batches are automatically created and you can expect both better retention and higher revenue from sustaining donors. In fact, one Blackbaud customer who adopted Optimized Donation Forms reported a 60% increase in average gift amounts.

3. Invite donors to pay your transaction fees.

You want online giving to be as cost-effective as possible and so do your supporters. Offer donors the option of covering your transaction fees so more of their gift goes to the mission, not to administrative costs. Blackbaud customers who have deployed Complete Cover, which empowers donors to pay 100% of processing fees, have rerouted thousands of dollars in fees back to mission. For instance, Manchester University saved $2,500 in fees in five months with Complete Cover.

4. Raise more money by leveraging all your data.

Smart donation forms ideally should be integrated with your nonprofit CRM and your payments platform, so you can access and use more data from more sources, including campaign metrics, financial tracking, and donor history. This cross-system feedback can transform your strategy and turn more contacts into donors: organizations using Blackbaud’s Online Giving Forms report an 18% increase in donor conversion.

5. Use technology to simplify your team’s work.

Adopt smarter tools to streamline your online giving program from the ground up, starting with time-saving form creation that allows you to edit, add, remove, arrange, and style fields and content. With the ease of drag-and-drop technology, there’s no need to hire a website developer to build a custom form.

Smarter online donation forms should provide your team with additional efficiencies with no extra cost:

• Advanced receipting

• Multiple automated retries for failed payments

• QR codes that provide easy access to your donation form at events or on postcards and brochures

• Integrated payment flow

• Automated donor acknowledgments