How is your "online donation" doing?

Can your nonprofit accept donation online? If so, how was it doing? Great? Not so great? So so? Don't know? Well, I guess online donation is very much like any website in a sense that it is not something that "once you build it, they will come". They demand careful nurturing and promoting, and yes, a lot of hard work.

Jakob Nielsen - the renowned usability expert - has done a research on how to improve online giving to nonprofits and charities. He found that what people most want to know before they decide whether to donate or not are "what are you trying to achieve, and how will you spend my money?". He looked at 23 nonprofit websites. Guess how many have answered the first question on their homepage - 43%. And the second question? 4%

He then looked at what are the biggest "donation turn-offs". The first one is content related - poor writing, confusing terms, etc. It is closely followed by usability problem - poor site design, cluttered pages, unintuitive navigation, etc (well, what do you expect from an usability expert, lol).

The full report costs US$98 and you can find more information here. Not cheap, but it is probably the best US$98 you can spend on your website.