Pinpointing Opportunities to Boost Your Fundraising Conversion Rate

This blog was written by Dara Daly, the Manager of Digital Marketing and SEO at Classy. Dara brings over a decade of experience in managing paid advertising campaigns for a diverse range of B2B and e-commerce companies.

According to the latest data from M+R, the average main donation page conversion rate was 12% in 2023. Whether you meet or miss that metric can hinge on several factors. Read on to discover the key influences on fundraising conversion rates and effective strategies for improvement.

Calculating conversion rate

First, let’s define the conversion rate:

Conversion rate = Total number of conversions / total number of sessions

Understanding this formula is crucial for assessing your nonprofit’s performance and pinpointing areas for improvement. However, accurately calculating and interpreting conversion rates requires trusted data. Your sources must be reliable and integrated seamlessly to deliver accurate, insightful results.

Securing the right integrations, like Google Analytics and Salesforce, is essential to ensuring data accuracy and consistency. As your nonprofit grows, graduating to a data warehouse may become a critical next step in centralizing information from various sources and providing a comprehensive view of donor behavior.

What influences your fundraising conversion rate

Numerous factors affect your fundraising conversion rate, from the quality of your website traffic to the user experience on your donation page. Strategies like A/B testing, optimizing the donation process, and ensuring your audience is well-targeted can significantly boost your results.

But how do you know who visits your site, and how can you best generate engagement from your ideal audience?

Segmentation breakdown

Take a closer look at the traffic sources driving visitors to your donation page. Have you noticed significant shifts in where your traffic originates?

Not all channels and traffic are created equal, so while understanding your overall conversion rate is helpful, improving it requires identifying what might drag it down. And don’t get concerned if each channel has different rates because the goal is to raise your overall benchmark.

Since conversion rates depend on traffic volume and the number of conversions, analyze both aspects. A channel with a low conversion rate might contribute only a small percentage of overall traffic and conversions. Focus on the channels with lower conversion rates that also represent a significant portion of your traffic or conversions.

What drives conversions

For conversion rate optimization, we recommend A/B testing to see what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing involves more than changing a button color. It examines the overall experience and identifies key areas for optimization.

At Classy, we constantly test our donation experiences to uncover what drives conversions for nonprofits using our software. We then scale successful strategies so everyone benefits from higher conversion rates.

Here are some factors that can affect your conversion rates:

• Copy: Do you alienate visitors with vague, confusing, or overly technical copy?
• External links: Is the goal of your page focused on getting donations?
• Payment options: Are you offering the payment methods your visitors prefer?
• Form placement and content: Is your donation form easy to find, simple to complete, and optimized for conversions? The ease of converting hinges on it.

And there’s much more to consider. We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to optimizing your donation page for conversions. Discover the top areas to focus on here.

Turning data into actionable insights

As we said in our first blog of this series, Decoding Donation Fluctuations, understanding “the why” behind each outcome will allow you to turn campaign data from mere numbers into valuable insights and action. These valuable insights create opportunities to improve your existing donation experience, allowing for adaptation, growth, and scaling based on donor engagement.

Copy Editor: Ayanna Julien