Usability guide to donations
25th February 2005
With the Internet being a cost effective way to raise funds, more and more charities are offering donors the chance to give money online. In this article User Vision identifies eight basic points to ensure that online donations are a quick and cost effective way for charities to raise money.
Online donations are a quick and cost effective way for charities to raise money. During the tsunami appeal the online response was fantastic, with donations pouring in on charity websites. Leading the non charity push Amazon.com, who utilised its streamlined and user friendly purchase process for the appeal, recorded US$3 million in aid in the first four days alone.
User Vision has put together a quick start usability guide to online donations. Reviewing several charity website we found a lot of good practice. Drawing on that and our own experience of transactional websites we have come up with eight basic points to make ensure that nothing gets in the way of users donating online.
1. Have a clear call to action
The call to action needs to be bold and straightforward, this is no place for niceties. In our survey of several charity sites we saw examples of clear link text ‘Donate’, ‘Donate now’, ‘Donate money’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Give’. These were most affective and eye catching as text link or simple buttons.
A few sites used images to link to their donation page. The intention may have been to raise the profile of the donate link but in many cases it actually ended up reducing its visibility by making it looking like an advert. As countless usability tests have shown users scan web pages, primarily using links, headings and highlighted section. Images and banners that look like ads are ignored.
On the ‘Donate now’ page of the ActionAid site the link to donating online is not in the middle of the page with the rest of the donation information text, but in the right hand column a changing Flash ad. When scanning the page this has much lower visibility than the text content due to its placement and also the motion of the ad may feed into the ‘banner blindness’ of motion on screen. When we first looked at this page we thought there was no online donation facility.
2. Concisely explain the benefit of donating
Users should be able to tell at a glance why they should donate and how their donation will help, but this message should not get in the way of completing the process. Our review showed that some sites found it hard to keep this concise, but other sites managed this well. Save the Children included a lot of information about how donations will help on the donation page, but had it in the right hand column and grouped into snappy facts about what help different amounts provides. So it was clearly visible but not cluttering the form.
As mentioned above, users do not often read lengthy text online so this information should be contained a couple of sentences with a hard punch.
3. Suggest amounts but allow specified amounts as well
Suggesting amounts, and showing how they can benefit the charitable cause, takes some of the thinking away for users and can be combined effectively with letting donors know how they will help. However, there should still be a field to allow users to specify odd amounts. The donation site contributed by Yahoo for the American Red Cross asked the user to click on a specified amount (see image). If you wanted to specify your own amount you had to do this over the telephone. This unnecessarily restricted the user in their giving.
4. Keep forms clear and simple
Form usability is a whole article in itself. Many e-commerce and financial websites we test have serious usability issues with their online forms. It was interesting that some usable e-commerce sites, like Amazon.com and iTunes, rapidly produced usable donation facilities in response to the Tsunami crisis. Charities can learn from the streamlined purchase processes on some e-commerce site. Here are a few guidelines to making forms usable:
- Do not ask user to register with your site to donate. Users hate being forced to give away their personal information, especially to direct-marketing-happy charities
- Only ask for essential information to keep the form as short as possible
- Make the labelling of each field clear and in the simple language, not ‘charity jargon’
- When errors occur in a form clearly point out to the user which fields are affected by listing them at the top of the form AND indicating next to the form label.
5. Make sure the Gift Aid option clear.
The Gift Aid scheme allows charities to reclaim the basic rate of tax already paid on all donations made by individuals. Charities need individuals to opt in to this scheme to maximise the donation. Yet many people who do not regularly give to charities will not be familiar with Gift Aid. This needs to be presented clearly and concisely so users understand the benefits to the charity of opting in. Care International present this very clearly and concisely with the GiftAid logo to the left of each tick box and an optional link for the user to click if they want to learn more about Gift Aid. On the other hand, Tearfund manage to stretch their explanation and declaration to 3 paragraphs (127 words as opposed to Care International’s 47 words) and include a date selection. This requires much more of the user’s time and complicates the Gift Aid process. Also, the text on this page is centre aligned, which makes reading it onscreen more difficult.
6. Emphasise security
As with any other online transaction, security and privacy (see below) are major concerns of users. Have a clear statement of security of the first form page. Some of the charities we reviewed had a logo on their site which indicated they were using a secure server to process the transactions. This reassures users that the site is professional and secure.
Other sites used a third party payment. As going to another site disrupts the user journey, they should still emphasise on their site that this is a secure method of paying. In testing we have observed people being reassured about security when a site linked into a well known third party payment site. So charities should use this to their advantage and inform users of this before they donate.
7. … and privacy
Charities have a reputation for being tenacious in their direct marketing. We have come across a ‘give them your address once and you will be getting junk mail for years’ attitude amongst users in relation to both online and offline giving. A transparent opt in (as opposed to opt out) option for future contact will increase users trust in a site. No one likes to think that a site is trying to obtain their contact details to use without their permission.
8. Integrate third party payment providers seamlessly
As mentioned above, some charities use third party payment process, like WorldPay. This can be reassuring for users as they know then the transactions are handled securely. However minimise the surprise element and ensure that it does not make the donation process disjointed. Some sites, like Christian Aid and World Vision, did not tell the user that they were going to a new site. However, they did show good practice by maintaining their branding on WorldPay. CAFOD, on the other hand, informs the user of the transition in the introductory text and the button text at the bottom of the form “Proceed to secure site”, as well as maintaining the branding.
What Can you do next?
- Read some more usability and accessibility articles.
- Find out how usability testing can improve your website.
- Attend one of our usability training courses and learn the tricks of the trade for yourself.
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This article was written by Chris Rourke. Chris is the Managing Director of User Vision, a usability and accessibility consultancy that helps clients gain a competitive advantage through improved ease of use.
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