Want more donations? Tie suggested giving amounts to real world benefits

27 June 2022  |  Alex Cavalli

Nearly two-thirds of donors want to know how their charity donations are going to be used. Over half want to see a specific list of projects.

One way charities can benefit from this human need for transparency and detail is to assign tangible benefits to suggested giving amounts. We explained the rationale behind suggested giving amounts in our previous blog post. Tying these donation figures to real world benefits has been shown to increase conversion rate.

This makes sense, because people are clearly going to be more generous if they know in advance what the outcome of their giving is going to be.

Examples of specific real world benefits

Specific benefits can be almost anything your imagination can come up with, including:

• Physical items such as shoes, clothing, computers and toys.
• Basic survival items such as food, accommodation, vaccinations and mosquito nets.
• Experiences such as holidays, theatre trips and days out in the country.
• Services such as legal advice, debt counselling or health advocacy.

A good example of a charity which has assigned specific benefits to suggested giving amounts is Dreamflight.

On their donation form, you can see how details about the available gifts work in tandem with the unequal distribution of suggested donor amounts.

For example, someone who is considering paying £15 to provide a child with a rucksack is likely to bump up their donation to £35 when they see that this would give a child a full day of fun at a theme park.

However, the donor who can afford £100 to send two children to Universal Studios is unlikely to drop to £35, because that would mean only benefitting one child.

Tips for optimising your giving offer

Here are some powerful ways to motivate people to click that donate button:

• Illustrate specific benefits with images or, better still, videos.
• Avoid visual clutter and information overload by limiting the benefit description to one or two sentences. Provide a link to further information if needed.
• Vary benefits depending on your campaign audience.
• Consider tying regular gifts to ongoing benefits.
• Specify the percentage of donations that will directly go to the beneficiary. Donors can be skeptical of the amount of money that goes into fundraising and overheads, and they will appreciate the transparency.

Whatever strategies you use, don’t forget to monitor results, and consider A/B testing to refine your donation form.

What about charities with undefined or rapidly changing priorities?

If your charity is unable to tie donations to a specific benefit, there are alternative options for increasing donor conversions.

If donations will go to one out of a range of possible benefits, you can still use actual examples, but include a qualification.

For example, Womankind describes several specific benefits, but uses the word ‘could’ to inform the donor that their gift may be diverted to a different benefit.

If none of your benefits are specified, you will need to rely on your content marketing to get donors inspired by your cause. Studies have revealed that people are more likely to give to an individual person than to a group, even going so far as to prefer giving to a single child over two siblings. This is known as the ‘identifiable victim effect’.

By publishing emotive case studies on your donations page, focused on individual people (or animals), your target donors will at least feel they are giving money to help real individuals rather than vague groups. This can also combat so-called ‘compassion collapse’, a phenomenon where people feel less compassion as the number of victims increase.

Has this article inspired you to come up with some specific gifts for your donation forms? Will you be tying these to suggested donation amounts? Let us know what impact this has on your donor conversion rate.