Introducing Raisely’s New Donation Form

I’m here today to tell you about the next generation of Raisely’s donation form. If you’re not sure why we’re talking about donation forms – let me first tell you that Raisely is an all-in-one fundraising platform that powers everything from regular giving to peer-to-peer fundraising for causes improving the wellbeing of people and planet.

And we’re obsessed with optimisation.

Your online donation form is the powerhouse of your charity’s revenue. It’s your version of a shopfront. When done well, it’s inviting, makes it simple for donors to give, delights them along the way, and makes their generous contribution feel immediately rewarding.

Raisely’s been fighting donation-forms-that-feel-like-census-forms for nearly 7 years, and we’ve made good progress. We:

• Step the form into 3 simple steps, a proven conversion-booster
• Provide clear, visual, optionally explainable button amounts
• Only ask necessary information by default
• Make it easy to pay through PayPal and digital wallets
• Celebrate donations with confetti, thank you messages, beautiful emails, and other moments of delight

On average, 1 in 5 visitors to a Raisely website gives – and once they select an amount, 85% of people complete their gift.

But we knew we could take the form further, so buried our heads in conversion optimisation studies, sketched up options, and ran A/B tests.

All of that thinking has found its way into version 3 of Raisely’s donation form. It’s a massive leap forward.

Let’s go through what’s changed. If you want to explore it for yourself, here’s a little preview campaign we made.

It’s all in the (design) details

We designed our new form from the ground-up, informed by our strong fundamentals but with a focus on polish, confidence-building and delight for donors.

You’ll find a more refined design in each layout, a more subtle step indicator, smooth animations between steps, and gentle scrolling to keep your screen at just the right point.

Being up-front with payment methods

Raisely’s own research has found that showing the payment methods we support on the first step of the form increases conversion rates and average gift, leading to a ~1% increase in donations received.

We’ve automatically added icons of the payment methods a donor can use to the bottom of the form.

Boosting perceived security

Studies have found that perceived security is important when people pay on the internet, and an easy way to do this is to assure our donors that the space they enter their card details in is secure – backed by Stripe’s legendary security and top-tier PCI compliance.

This subtle change, plus an emphasis on a smooth “glitch-free” experience in the rest of the form, helps build donor confidence that their card details are in safe hands.

A really big thank-you

A donor’s experience shouldn’t end when they enter their card details and hit “Donate”. This is the start of a journey of change with your charity, so we want to say thank you right.

We bring in a beautiful, branded animation to celebrate their gift, and then ask them to share your appeal, profile page, or campaign with their friends and family to amplify their impact even further.

Ask donors to give regularly

Monthly giving is the rock-solid, predictable income charities need to thrive. Equally, donors want the greatest impact for their contribution. Raisely’s new donation form adds three key features to boost the number of people who donate to your charity regularly.

Double your regular giving

When someone makes a single gift, we’ll automatically ask them to convert that to a monthly donation. Donating $100? How about $50 a month instead for even more impact?

This upsell asks donors to consciously decide if they’d like to make a more regular contribution, and in our research – they do.

Including an upsell to regular giving onboards twice as many new regular donors, as donation forms without one. This means you earn at least 6.5% more for your appeal, over time. If you’re keen to dive deeper into the research, check out Martin’s post diving into our regular donation upsell numbers.

Soon, the amount we ask donors to give monthly will be informed by our own machine learning model – constantly improving over time.

Nudge donors to give monthly

While an upsell is the best way to boost monthly donations, we’ve added delight to the “Monthly” button on your donation form, and added a “nudge” to help donors understand that giving monthly has a greater impact.

In Raisely’s new donation form, this nudge is editable – and we’d encourage you to use it to explain in a few words what monthly givers mean to you.

Accept direct debits online

We’ve heard from many of the charities that we support that around half of their donors like to give via direct debit instead of credit card. Direct debits are great for charities. They’re reliable, fail less, and cost less to process.

Accepting a regular gift via direct debit is supported out-of-the-box with Raisely’s v3 donation form in Australia and the United Kingdom. Support for New Zealand and the United States will come soon.

Let’s dim the lights

Raisely’s donation form has always been an in-page form, sitting alongside compelling content and imagery to encourage visitors to give.

But we thought we could take it further, and offer more ways for you to bring your donation form into your content. Our answer – donation buttons.

Donation buttons can be placed anywhere in your Raisely page, and open a beautiful new donation modal that dims the lights, and puts all the focus on completing a donation.

Next to the modal, you can include information about your appeal, how much you’ve raised so far, and from how many donors. You can see it in action by clicking an amount up the top of our demo site here.

We’re excited to make donation buttons embeddable, in addition to the donation form, on non-Raisely websites in the future.

Plus, a bonus for British charities

Raisely’s new donation form makes it even easier for British charities to collect Gift Aid from donations. Through an integration with our friends at Swiftaid, Gift Aid can be automatically claimed for eligible donors.

Plus – using Swiftaid’s extensive donor database – we’re able to automatically identify when a donor has a valid Gift Aid declaration and automatically apply it to their gift.

Gift Aid means 25% more raised, without any extra work. You can set up your Swiftaid integration in your Raisely admin panel.

This upgrade is a huge step forward for giving on Raisely, and I’m so proud that we can offer this technology under a donor-supported model, for charities of every size.

We’ve poured months into building the perfect donation form, so you don’t have to. And we continue to obsessively track, optimise, iterate, and improve.

If you’re already using Raisely, upgrade today by heading to Settings > Donation Form in your campaign.If your organisation hasn’t yet opted Raisely’s fundraising tools, now’s the time to try them out. We’d love to show you around, just pop your details in for a demo here.