This is the follow up to the original post on how you’re losing web donations.

Given we were only halfway through all our donating for the (now) last financial year when I wrote the first article, I thought I’d follow up with other awful things your charities are doing or making us do when it comes to giving you our money.

1. No thank you after donating. Just a stark “your donation is working immediately”. We’re glad to know that although the wording is a bit odd – after all, I’m not expecting a beneficiary to have instantaneous access to the funds. Better to say, “Your donation is on its way to those who need it.”

And it’s polite to say thank you.

2. No confirmation the donation was received. My husband hit the Submit button but did it go through? There was a confirmation page that had other details but no acknowledgement of the amount we gave – or that we gave at all! Did we use the right form? Was there a system glitch?

3. When there’s an error, there’s no indicator of which field the error was in. Name? Suburb? Donation amount? Which box did we not fill in? Couldn’t tell.

So the donor has to go through each field in turn to figure out what information you want that hasn’t been given. (And imagine if this was a multi-page form and you didn’t know which page the missing info was on?!)

4. Donation form was in really small font. I already bump up the font size on my screens. I don’t like it when I have to hit Command + another 10 times. And imagine how teeny that text will look on a mobile phone screen…

We’re trying to give you money here. Why are you making it so hard?

5. When clicking on the DONATE button on the home page, it leads to a world map. This is a very good way to confuse a donor. My husband was officially confused. It’s okay to take a donor to an appeal page but it has to look like an appeal. Upon hearing mutterings of frustration, I had a look at it and am not entirely sure it WAS an appeal page (I’ve written a lot of them so I would know).

Then my husband had to hunt around for another DONATE button that actually leads to a donation form.

Hint: ensure an obvious link or button to donate is on every single scroll of the screen. A donor should not need to scroll six or seven times hunting for a DONATE button.

Okay so that’s all the bad stuff out of the way. Most of these things are very easy to fix. Please fix them so you can raise more money for your causes!

And coming soon – a post on the GOOD things we found while donating. Because all charities can learn from these!