4 online donor engagement strategies to elevate your website

Guest post by Joshua Layton, co-founder of Loop: Design For Social Good

Of the various donor engagement tools in your nonprofit’s toolkit, your website is among the most critical—and the most often overlooked. Your website is the hub of your organization’s online presence, where current and potential supporters can learn about all of the ways you’re making a difference in your community and get involved through donating, volunteering, advocacy, or other activities.

However, this is only possible if your nonprofit puts time and effort into its website design. Your site should draw visitors in from the moment they land on it and make them want to stay until they’re ready to take the next step.

In this guide, we’ll walk through four strategies to maximize your website’s potential for online supporter engagement. Let’s get started!

1. Create a compelling donation page

The first step in using nonprofit website design to encourage giving is to make your online donation page as easy to find as possible. Add a call-to-action (CTA) button to your site header that links to your donation page to make it stand out from all of your other content.

From there, use the page itself to encourage visitors to complete the online giving process by including:

• Your nonprofit’s branding. Prominently featuring your logo, brand fonts, and color scheme makes your donation page look more professional and trustworthy. Include mission-related messaging and imagery as well to help push interested supporters across the finish line of donating.
• Suggested donation amounts. These show uncertain donors how much your organization needs to support its mission (especially if you add examples of what each amount could do for those you serve) and make recurring donations easier.
• A matching gift tool. 360MatchPro’s matching gift marketing guide recommends embedding this software directly into your donation page to spread awareness of the opportunity and allow donors to quickly check their eligibility. 
• Flexible, secure payment processing. Ensure your donation processor accepts various payment methods (all major credit cards, ACH transfers, and mobile payments) and has built-in measures to protect donors’ sensitive information.

Even with all of these elements, your donation page should fit on one screen—that way, donors will be more likely to fill out and submit the form. These tips also apply to designing pages that encourage other types of engagement, like volunteer signups or event registration forms.

2. Optimize the user experience

User experience (UX) is a critical factor in determining how long visitors are willing to spend on your nonprofit’s website—and therefore, how likely they are to engage. If a community member isn’t familiar with your organization, they’ll probably visit a few pages to explore your work before taking the next step, so they should be able to do so easily.

A few areas of UX to prioritize in your web development efforts include:

Navigation

Help visitors find what they’re looking for with a well-organized site menu. Upon landing on your site, community members should see a bar at the top with major categories of pages labeled (About, Resources, Get Involved, etc.). Then, create drop-down lists of relevant pages within each category (e.g., the labels Blog and Free Downloads might fall under Resources) along with CTA buttons to your donation page and one more optional engagement opportunity like volunteering or membership.

Mobile-friendliness

As of 2023, 52% of nonprofit website traffic comes from mobile devices. Optimize your site for this large audience segment by using a responsive design framework, which automatically resizes pages according to the visitor’s screen size. Additionally, check that your site menu, buttons, and form fields are large enough for supporters to tap on a touchscreen without accidentally clicking something else.

Accessibility

According to Loop’s guide to the best nonprofit websites, “Every visitor to your website should be able to interact with your content, including those with disabilities.” Use an official checklist such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 to bring your site up to industry accessibility standards and promote inclusivity with your design choices.

The best judges of website UX are often the users themselves. As you design your site, gather input from volunteers through surveys and usability tests. Then, once your developments go live, continue collecting visitor feedback so you can make adjustments as needed.

3. Incorporate multimedia content

In addition to user-friendliness, engaging content is essential to draw visitors into your site. While compelling writing lays a strong foundation, incorporating multimedia elements levels up your content to engage audience members’ senses more deeply. For example, you could:

• Compile photo galleries to show your staff and volunteers hard at work or community members benefiting from your services.
• Design infographics to make complex information like impact statistics or financial data more digestible and interactive.
• Make various types of videos—from supporter testimonials to event recaps—and embed them throughout your site.

Accessible design is particularly important with multimedia content, such as adding alternative text to images and closed captions to videos. Also, remember to obtain consent before sharing anyone’s real name, face, or voice on your website.

4. Promote your website via other marketing channels

Although your website is a critical donor engagement platform, it’s just one piece of a successful nonprofit marketing strategy. Use your other communications channels to guide potential supporters to your website, where they can learn more and take action.

Promote your nonprofit’s website through marketing materials like:

• Email blasts and newsletters that provide regular updates on your work.
• Text messages to meet potential mobile visitors where they are—on their smartphones.
• Social media posts on popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
• Digital ads on search engines and other websites.
• Print communications like flyers and direct mail (QR codes come in handy here!)

While it’s tempting to incorporate your donation page into every marketing message, strategically choosing website pages to link to will help you get a wider variety of involvement. For example, if you run a Google Ad that targets volunteer-related search terms, promote your volunteer signup form. Or, if you spotlight a major donor in your email newsletter, you could link to an informational page about the project they contributed to.

As you implement these strategies on your nonprofit’s website, monitor its performance by tracking metrics like daily site visits, page views, form completion rates, and traffic from other marketing channels. These analytics combined with visitor feedback provide a holistic view of your organization’s online donor engagement, allowing you to continuously improve your website and inspire more support for your mission.