2 Simple Strategies to Increase Donations Using Your Website

Many nonprofit organizations are leaning heavily on digital marketing and donation appeals due to the ever-growing cost of snail mail, among other reasons. If your organization is adopting this trend, are you utilizing the right tools and strategies to optimize the amount of online donations you receive?

Here, we’ll explain two simple strategies for improving your organization’s corporate-giving metrics by making just a few simple edits to your website.

‘Ways to Give’ and donation confirmation Web pages
Almost every nonprofit has a section on its website that allows constituents to make online donations. When donors have the easy and convenient option to donate with credit or debit cards, it increases the likelihood of securing donations. On these pages (pre- and post-donation), your organization can add images, links and other kinds of attention-catching items to educate your donors about the possibility of matching gifts.

Briefly put, matching gifts are a kind of corporate-giving program in which an employer matches an employee’s donation, generally dollar for dollar, to an eligible nonprofit organization. For example, when an employee of General Electric makes a $50 donation to a charity of her choice, GE matches the donation at a 1:1 ratio, resulting in a total of $100 donated to the charity.

If you need another reason to promote matching gifts to your donors, more than 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies offer some form of matching-gift program, and thousands of other corporations (big and small) do, too. There are billions of dollars being left behind annually because nonprofits don’t take full advantage of these corporate-giving programs — don’t be part of that statistic!

Include a catchy image that mentions matching gifts on your “Ways to Give” page and on your donation confirmation page (you’re already three-quarters the way to victory, since the donor already made the initial donation) to get the attention of your donors. Because many donors simply don’t know about matching-gift opportunities, it’s a simple and effective way to increase the amount of money being brought in through corporate-giving programs.