Can your donors find the participant or team they want to support on your event site? Many peer-to-peer fundraising events face this challenge: The “search” functionality is hard to find, so the donor clicks the general “donate” button instead.
In the best-case scenario, the event experiences an increase in general gifts. On the not so ideal side, the gift goes to the wrong recipient (individual or team), and worst case, the donor could leave the site without making a gift at all.
An often-overlooked outcome of a poor user experience — for both the donor and participant — is the resulting negative opinion of the event and the organization that can deter future support. Donors should be able to search for an event participant or team and make their gift in one simple step.
Another challenge facing organizations due to poor user experience on an event donor form is the resulting — and often significant — increase in support tickets (or requests to staff if there is no designated support option) to find the correct participant or to move, modify, or change the donation to the intended recipient. This can require a baseline technical knowledge of the fundraising program to fulfill the support requests, diverting program staff away from high-ROI fundraising activities.
Here are some signs that your organization may need to find a solution for your online search and donor form capabilities: Are you experiencing mid-high volume in support traffic for “finding a participant or team” or for erroneous donations? Do you have low participant search to donation form conversion rates, or overall low donation form conversion rates?
Organizations that raise a minimum of $100,000 annually through their P2P fundraising programs, that hold multiple events or event locations, or have a large number of donation forms should evaluate their online search and donor form and see if the process can be streamlined.
For organizations that use the standard Luminate Online donation experience, we developed a combined search-and-donate form that integrates participant functionality into the flow of the donation form. The search functionality can link to a single event or search across multiple-location events or event types. The system recognizes which event the recipient is associated with to ensure proper attribution to their fundraising total, as well as the correct allocation on the organization side for accounting and reporting purposes.
This solution can help improve the user experience by:
- Capitalizing on one entry point (e.g., the donation button)
- Maintaining all donation activity on a single page
- Providing multiple event and location searches
It also decreases administrative and support requests related to donation errors and allows organizations to track donations to specific event locations or chapters. While the form still has all of the standard donation fields, adding the “search” functionality takes it to the next level and allows nonprofits to have a single integrated donation form across all of their P2P events, making the search-and-donate process much less stressful for you, your constituents, and their donors.