Did you know that 95% of organizations around the world have some element of friction in their online giving experience proven to hurt donation conversion rates? Or that an Online Donor is 14% more likely to get an email than an Email Subscriber is over 90 days but they’ll also receive fewer emails overall and a higher percentage of them will be solicitations?
Those are just two of the many interesting things we discovered by becoming a mystery Online Donor and Email Subscriber to 630 different organizations across 10 industry verticals in 9 countries — Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States — capturing, cataloguing, and analyzing our experience along the way.
Through that process, we saw some unique differences in the donor experience between countries. For example, Germany and the United Kingdom were 12 times more likely to offer a way to give online via bank compared to Australia or Canada. And the Netherlands was 4 times more likely to default to a recurring gift than the United States — where 2 out of 3 organizations defaulted to a one-time gift — and 40 times more likely than France where 3 in 5 organizations had no default selection at all.
The purpose of these insights and this study overall is to better understand what organizations are doing (or not doing) when it comes to their online fundraising through the perspective of the donor and establish a user experience ‘benchmark’ that can be used to help organizations see how they compare and where they can improve.
After analyzing 535 email signups, 585 online donations, and 5,976 email communications in the 9 countries it’s clear that, while progress is being made, there is a continued need to be testing, optimizing, and refining current practices to provide a better donor experience that can help organizations achieve the impact they want and is so needed in the world today.
Specifically, we’ve identified 8 key findings and that are opportunities for growth.
Globally, we could only successfully sign up for email 73% of the time and complete donations 80% of the time. Even after removing two outlier countries2, those success rates only go up to 83% and 92% which means we still couldn’t sign up successfully 17% of the time and complete a donation 8% of the time. And that was just to sign up or complete a donation. We found that only 73% of organizations sent at least 1 email to the Email Subscriber in 90 days and just 83% sent at least one email of any kind to the Online Donor.
To download the full report with all 8 findings, click here.
Salesforce.org is a social impact center of Salesforce focused on partnering with the global community to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Find out more at Salesforce.org.
NextAfter’s mission is to decode what works in fundraising and make it accessible to as many nonprofits as possible. Learn more at nextafter.com
