happy donors

Mashable.com is worth tracking for tips in a great variety of endeavors … business, fundraising, or just better keeping up with the accelerating growth of social media.  (I missed sxsw two years now, not tweeting yet, feeling pretty damn 20th century.)

A recent post in the general social media category: 9 Ways to Do Good With 5 Minutes or $25.

I’ve seen this in varying permutations for quite a while now.  The Free Rice site has been active for three years.  Check it out if you haven’t: you play a moderately addictive spelling puzzle, each win triggering a donation of 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme.  Click “subjects” on the top nav to switch to history, math, and other quizzes.

Sponsorship on this is beautiful to my eyes, a great example of online cause marketing.  Their names are front and center with answers.  You gotta love them for this giveaway.  And it can’t cost the THAT much, even with 94 billion grains donated so far.  More cost-efficient than an ad on the Superbowl, I’d wager.

Kiva is a great cause, great bang for the buck with smart microlending.

When I attended the International Fundraising Congress a few years ago, micro-fundraising sites seemed pretty well established, at least in Europe.  Drive people to a custom Facebook page or other hosted site, ask for relatively small donations, but lots of them … essentially the power of face-to-face with friends adapted for online.   Like sponsoring my running a 10K for a cause, essentially.

I haven’t seen these sprouting in my line of sight.  Maybe my age?  Out of touch?  Living in the USA?

I recently received a flurry of email exchanges on the issue of whether it’s still essential to load content at the top of a web page … “above the fold” in old newspaper parlance and current web design argot.

This article sparked the discussion.  Here Jakob Neilsen affirms his past retraction of the old “keep key content above the fold” maxim, while at the same time cautioning people to design for limited attention spans.

Someone tossed this post into the discussion, a delightful demonstration that the fold needn’t be a barrier.  Written by Paddy Donnelly, though the source is very hard to find, since it’s so damn far below the fold!

All valid considerations, yet, Paddy aside, fundraisers will be well served to KEEP YOUR ASKS ABOVE THE FOLD.  You don’t want anyone to miss these, since they pay the bills.

The “fold” is still an active concern in email, only it’s a tad tighter piece of geography.

What do people see in their email preview pane?   Not much.

So it’s critical to get a gift opportunity in front of the recipient in that split second. 

“People would rather delete than scroll”  is still a sound guideline.

That said, you can also leverage that space to BUY READERSHIP in what follows … essentially get people to start reading, much as Paddy’s page does.

An anecdote from the early days of emails, the mid 1990s.   Use of graphics was quite limited back then.  A friend had written an email campaign for a tech company.  In one highly successful email, a picture of a face was cropped in half in the preview pane.

Trying to “improve” the email, an art director slid the image up and to right, so the full face was visible.

The result?  A big drop in response.

People had evidently started scrolling out of our species’ natural need for completion … to see the entire face.   This bought READERSHIP … the email was open and being scrolled.

When the face was in full view, no scrolling was needed, no readership bought.

Here’s an excellent commentary on website usability testing written by Robert Hoekman Jr in the alistapart blog for web designers.

A lot is cautionary.  Good important stuff, most of which won’t apply to the small organization engaged in do-it-yourself usability testing on nonprofit (or other) websites. 

I’ve engaged in several usability sessions for such groups and never saw any risk of the issues Hoekman mentions.  But they’re still well worth reading, because they do point to bear traps out there in the usability testing world, situations where you can easily generate highly unreliable results that can mislead your web development.

The article highlights three key benefits that in simplest forms justify every small-scale usability testing effort:

1)  Usability testing has high shock value.   Everyone goes into testing fully confident that everything is just peachy, intuitive, easy, etc.   A couple of rounds of testing shows the glaring problems that those who developed the site were too close to see.

2) Usability establishes trust with stakeholders.  Hey, just doing usability testing elevates your standing in the eyes of boards etc who don’t know much about the web and often doubt your knowledge.

3) Usability testing is, as Hoekman frames it, part of the “triangulation process” that includes org goals, user goals, other metrics, etc, to gain a more complete picture of what you’re doing on the web, and how good a job you’re doing from multiple vantages.

The article also includes a number of tools to identify trouble spots, like “5-second tests” (which I’ve seen work remarkably well) and tests involving click stats.

Check it out.

As a veteran direct marketer, I trust tests in the mail far above any traditional research.

Send out two mail packages to two lists, a random A/B split, and see what happens.  Your prospects / donors will tell you which is the better in the most concrete way possible: with their gifts.

Survey research, focus groups, any other kind of “testing” provides opinions and are far too often skewed by sampling issues and dynamics of the testing environment.   If you’ve ever watched a focus group be “led” by one strong personality, you know what I mean.

In the last year, I’ve finally come to rely on another form of research though:  usability testing — putting appropriately naive users in front of a web site and see what they do.

This is trustworthy because it tests the only important thing:  how people behave.  Not what they think, not their opinion, but what they do, how they act.

If you’re not doing usability testing on your web site, you’re probably leaving money on the table.

Correcting usability issues empowers donors who use your site.   When people fumble around on a poorly designed web site, they generally think “I’m stupid” … an impression you never want to give a donor.  And only users can really reveal faults in design, often missed by web designers and site owners who are too close to the situation to see things clearly.

When you leave someone confused or frustrated, you’ve broken the chain of donor cultivation.  Bad, bad, bad.

A friend recently relayed a new, very simple, overview called Usability Testing Demystified, from the blog A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites.   No coding knowledge required.

Check it out.  Keep up with this stuff.  It’s important.

Smashing Magazine recently surveyed and compiled a nice cross-section of web site font use — Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices.   It’s not so much about “best”  as “most commonly used”, but it covers font styles, sizes in headline and body, backgrounds, optimal line height, etc.

Good info and links to other good info on fonts.  Also offers 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines.  A web design site to bookmark.

TheAgitator.com — the best advice/commentary blog for nonprofits out there — recently commented on the Nielson Norman report I just cited.  Blackbaud’s Steve McLauglin posted some comments on this including “Some good nuggets in the report include:
- Fixing a process with even minor usability problems might increase donations by 10%.  ((Happydonors is NOT surprised by this randon-sounding stat.  Probably a lowball.  Minor usability glitches => major transaction problems.))
-The most frequently mentioned turnoffs was a lack of or unclear description of an organization’s mission, goals, objectives, or work.
- Confirmation pages are critical on both e-commerce and donation sites. However, non-profit and charity sites must include a confirmation page as part of the donation process, which should include a receipt for tax purposes. Additionally, a receipt should be emailed to the address provided during the donation process.
- On the confirmation page, thank users for their donation. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but a simple recognition is appreciated. Also, it’s nice to reiterate how the money will be used.

Enough ripping off The Agitator.  As noted, every time I do the most primitive usability testing, it points out big opportunities to clarify messaging on web sites.  Try it!   And it sounds like this Nielsen Report might well be worth the investment.