Your Donation Page Is Out-Of-Date

Your donation page is probably not as good as it could be. As a result you're losing donations and the people who are giving to you aren't probably giving as much as they could.

You need to overhaul your donation page and there's plenty of great tips out there on what it should look like:

• Beate Sørum posts awesome tips on her blog: "From good intentions to more web donations"
• Both Jeff Brooks and Sean Triner (essential follows) shared this post: "20 Landing Pages Torn Apart"
• And I've blogged about it before: "Raise More Money On-Line Tomorrow"

But even if you follow all that great advice your donation page is going to be out-of-date.

Why?

Well, because you don't know what your next appeal is. You don't know what the next big news story is. When you designed your donation page you might have know why people were visiting it, but you probably don't know why they're going to visit it today or tomorrow.

So how do you deal with that?

Well, the next time you're putting your money in to your website make sure you get an adaptable donation page. You almost certainly don't have an in-house website person and can't afford to pay an agency every time you want to change something, so you need to make sure you can edit your donation page from the back-end at no extra cost.

More than that, you need more than one donation page. You need to have your standard donation page, but you need to be able to quickly set up up a donation page customised to the #IceBucketChallenge, #FreeGaza, #MigrantX or whatever is going to motivate people to want to help you.

The customised pages need to have relevant images, relevant text, relevant stories, a relevant Thank You, and a relevant 'shopping list' - even a relevant URL. Have a look next time and what you'll see is almost all charities have the same generic donation page with no mention of what drove them there.

Remember, your donors aren't donating to you. They're donating to your cause...or more specifically how they interpret your cause. Your donation page needs to match their interpretation.