You may not have given much thought to your online giving experience. After all, gifts are coming in … it must be working just fine, right?
At Vision2, we talk a lot about the giving experience. It’s one of the few ways we know of that giving technology can actually help givers engage more deeply with their church.
We’ve learned that an unengaging, frustrating or generic giving experience most definitely impacts your givers’ generosity.
Some devoted givers will push through a bad or boring experience, but how many gifts are being abandoned? How many are giving elsewhere, where they can know exactly how their gift is making a difference? How many are giving what they came intending to give, instead of being inspired to give more?
If you’d like to see giving increase, ask these 8 questions – and get your own answers – by giving a gift in your system as if you’ve never done it before (or ask a newbie to do it). This could be the best online gift you get all year.
Then look at these steps along the way:
When someone arrives at your website, it should take seconds to find the giving page.
Not offering guest checkout (or hiding it) is a major reason for gift abandonment.
Does the giving form feel like a bill with the amount field front and center? Or does it use rich media (images, video and descriptions) to demonstrate how your church is making a difference in the community and world? Here’s an example of what we mean from one of our client’s giving pages.
There should be only a few fields to complete and it should take just a few minutes the first time and less than a minute after that.
Type in $100,000 to find out your platform’s limit. If there is a limit, does that not strike you as counter-intuitive, to ask givers to not be so generous? It does to us.
A third-party redirect mid-gift is actually the #1 reason for gift abandonment. It can make givers feel insecure about the safety of their transaction. And it is usually followed by the problem covered in the next question.
This is another major reason for gift abandonment. But even if nobody minds, why would you want to let a third party have the final word with your givers?
Here are some examples of each that will speak more eloquently than a thousand words on the subject. If you want givers to be left with a good feeling and feel inspired to give again, don’t waste this opportunity to convey the impact of the gift AND your heartfelt appreciation.
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How did your giving experience fare?
Vision2 is the only giving software that allows churches to easily demonstrate the impact of gifts with our media-rich “give story” galleries, as shown above. This gallery, built right into your giving page, is just one reason for the 23% digital gift lift our clients see in the first year.
Ready to learn more? Reach out here.