More Than Just a Warm Fuzzy
With just the click of a mouse, shoppers can buy nearly any product online — from groceries to cars, from insurance policies to home loans. And potential donors can form intimate relationships with the nonprofit organizations of their choices — getting information, registering for events and responding to other calls to action, and, ultimately, making donations or, better yet, signing up for automatically deducted monthly giving programs.
So as long as your organization’s Web site is good-looking, easy to navigate, full of useful information and proudly displaying a “Donate Now” button, you should be OK, right?
Not if you want people to actually use that button. Just like consumers expect merchants to not only make their products available on the Web, but also to make paying for them a simple and secure process, donors want to know that their personally identifiable information and banking details are safe with your organization and on your Web site.
A survey by ACNielsen found that the top security concerns of America’s online shoppers include:
*Not receiving the items purchased or receiving items different from what was described.
*E-mail addresses being sold to third parties.
*Fears about personal or financial information being stolen.
*E-mail scams known as “phishing” or “spoofing” in which consumers receive messages from dishonest sources disguised as messages from trusted retailers, financial institutions or nonprofit organizations.
And don’t think the concerns are any different just because your site visitors aren’t technically buying anything. From unclear donor messaging to shoddy follow-through to concerns over being scammed and robbed, your donors are just as worried about their online experiences with you as they are with their online florists, stock brokers and shoe stores.
Assuring Web site visitors
How can these insecurities about correct and ethical behavior on the Internet be resolved? One of the best ways is to have a reputable third party that has experience in seeing through possible pitfalls vouch for you — pitfalls where you, the Web site owner, or the visitor can be trapped or cheated. The third-party company must have expertise in e-commerce as well as certain laws about privacy and terms of use; in essence, know how things work online and why.
