Learn how to optimise your crowdfunding campaign page to generate donor engagement and raise funds.
Guest blog post from Anne Stefanyk, Founder & CEO of Kanopi Studios.
Modern fundraising happens online, so it thrives with community outreach and social sharing. Campaigns like Facebook fundraisers and crowdfunding are some of the most popular and successful endeavours you might see.
With each of these online fundraising efforts comes a campaign page. Crowdfunding, in particular, relies on a dedicated page to appeal to supporters’ emotions, provide details on the cause at hand, and ultimately incentivize an online gift.
A piece of advice for any nonprofit landing or campaign page is to look at your donor journey from the donor’s perspective.
If you take the steps to make your crowdfunding campaign page more donor-friendly, you’re more likely to not only engage site visitors in valuable ways but also increase donations for your nonprofit. Here are some top tips:
- Ensure your website funnels visitors to the campaign page
- Make your campaign page mobile-friendly
- Brand the page to match your nonprofit organization
- Tell your story with varied media content
- Make it easy to donate
- Don’t lead your donors away
From the stories you tell to the visuals you leverage, your campaign page can be either the key to reaching your fundraising goals, or the obstacle keeping you from them. Common risks include the page layout being too confusing or not giving your donors enough information. Ready to learn more? Let’s begin.
As soon as someone lands on your nonprofit website, they should know exactly where to go for the content they want. In this case, site visitors are seeking information on your crowdfunding page.
To ensure your website funnels visitors to your campaign page, you should have an intuitive navigation menu, cleverly placed call-to-action buttons, and a spotlight on your homepage:
- Navigation menu. You should install a sticky navigation menu so that users can easily see your most popular pages even as they’re scrolling through your pages. Add a menu link to direct users to your crowdfunding campaign page. Then, when the campaign is over, you can replace this link with another upcoming event.
- Calls-to-action (CTAs). CTAs are links and buttons throughout your website’s content that incentivizes users to take specific actions. For example, you might embed a CTA on your mission statement page of a button with the text “Want to take us one step closer to our mission? Check out our current crowdfunding campaign.”
- Homepage spotlight. Likely, new visitors will first land on your homepage. Your homepage should highlight popular engagements like your online donation form and your events calendar to introduce them to your cause. Your homepage can also showcase current fundraising campaigns. Rotate this out as needed, but a dedicated homepage spotlight for your crowdfunding campaign with an engaging image or graphic can attract users.
Instead of a dedicated page on your website, you might even create a charity microsite. This is an individual web page or a small cluster of pages that function as a separate site to complement an existing nonprofit’s website. Make sure to include a link to this on your main website and other marketing materials.
Microsites can track your marketing leads and host dedicated campaign information. If you’re hoping to attract new supporters, microsites are an excellent way to introduce them to your cause with targeted content. It’s also easily shareable! For more information on how to create a successful microsite, explore Kanopi’s dedicated resource.
This past year over 90% of the global internet population used a mobile device to go online. It’s not crazy to think that a large chunk of your online supporters is viewing and sharing your campaign from their phones.
Most online giving software and content management systems (CMS) can automatically optimize a mobile-responsive version of your campaign page. However, there are a couple of minor tweaks that you can easily do on your own.
As you’re setting up your crowdfunding campaign page, here are some standard best practices and easy changes to make to support a mobile-friendly page:
- Use attention-grabbing titles & headings for each section
- Link out to any relevant articles, documents or websites
- Keep your layout vertical, most important information first
- Avoid large chunks of text; break it up with images & video
- Test your campaign page on mobile
If you want to reach the widest audience possible, your crowdfunding campaign page must be mobile-friendly. Otherwise, you risk missing out on a large chunk of donations and connecting with new donors.
Luckily, Pozible campaigns are optimised for mobile and can preview both the web and mobile versions in the Project Editor before launching.
No matter if your campaign page is within your main website’s internal structure or on a separate microsite, it must be branded to your organization.
Good branding creates consistency, which is crucial for establishing trust with your donors. And, remember, you want to make your campaign page as donor-friendly as possible. If your campaign page suddenly looks different from the rest of your website, it can confuse and worry donors that they’re not on the right page.
Consistent branding also helps introduce new supporters to your mission, increasing the chance of them recognizing it in future campaigns or events.
When designing your campaign page, make sure it reflects the general feel of your main website and other online marketing materials like social media or email content. This means using the same colors, imagery, style, font, and voice. It’s also a great idea to include your nonprofit logo and/or your mission statement at the top of the campaign page.
A big motivator for giving to a nonprofit is because the donor is passionate about your cause and resonates with the story. The story of this crowdfunding campaign should reflect your core mission and be specific to the goals you want to achieve.
Usually, site visitors can learn your story on your ‘About Us’ page or with your mission statement. Your crowdfunding campaign page needs to introduce the major points to new visitors, but also reiterating your story can motivate existing donors even to increase their donation amount!
To take your crowdfunding campaign page’s storytelling a step further, don’t just rely on text. This is because visual content like images, video, and graphics effectively convey a message more quickly and are more memorable.
A Pitch Video is the easiest way to convey your message and speak to your donors directly. Video content also lends itself to being shared and there’s no limits to how creative and targeted you can be with your message.
Suppose your media content becomes popular enough or evokes emotion from your audience. In that case, you can take it a step further and put it on other marketing materials or even on merchandise.
For instance, Frejya’s Make-A-Wish crowdfunding campaign made great use of a graphic. Freyja’s one wish was to swim with dolphins, and so her crowdfunding campaign was ordained with a drawing of dolphins with the words “be plastic-free.” This drawing was so impactful that it was even put on tote bags and sold to support the campaign.
Within your crowdfunding campaign page, you’ll have a wealth of information about your nonprofit and specific cause. While this is important, you also need to remember to not get in the way of potential donors.
Maybe it’s because the page is too long or confusing, or perhaps the user simply got distracted with an Instagram notification and never went back. No matter what, keeping your donation process as streamlined and efficient as possible is the best practice.
The easier it is for donors to check out, the more likely they’ll donate.
Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Only ask for the bare minimum information like name, contact, & payment
- If you do ask additional questions, mark them as optional and only stick to 1 or 2
- Have multiple payment options for your donors
With more donors choosing to give via mobile, it’s important to have mobile-first payment options like express checkout with Google Pay & Apple Pay.
The last piece of advice might seem obvious. Of course, you want to keep people on your campaign page and get them engaged with your content.
However, more often than you’d think, nonprofits fall into the trap of putting unnecessary page elements that just distract users and cause them to click away.
The main goal of your crowdfunding campaign page is to get them to give and complete their donations successfully. So, get rid of anything on your campaign page that distracts users from completing the task..
These distractions include:
- Links to other irrelevant site content
- Including outdated or unnecessary information
- Information on other campaigns or causes
- Using a vague Call-To-Action without urgency
Just like your regular donation page, all of the information on your crowdfunding campaign page should focus on one goal. This goal is to engage visitors, get them to resonate with the cause at hand, and ultimately lead them to make a contribution.
If you want to make your nonprofit’s crowdfunding campaign page as optimized as possible, always put yourself in your donors’ shoes. Consider how they will interact with your campaign content. How might they click through different site pages? And how easy is it to fill out your donation form? All these questions and more can help you ensure that your campaign page is donor-friendly and leveraging all opportunities to your benefit. Good luck!
AUTHOR: ANNE STEFANYK
Kanopi Studios is a web agency helping clients identify their problems and turning them into actionable outcomes.
Kanopi was born from Anne’s desire to build strong, sustainable, creative websites. The name “Kanopi” represents her passion for treehouses & websites, as both are sustainable ecosystems under a larger canopy. Both have beautiful architecture, are customizable, & are limited only by creativity.
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