You can achieve your nonprofit fundraising goals with these UX design methods.

Unlocking the Power of User Experience to Boost Your Nonprofit Donations.

You want your nonprofit website to share your mission and inspire people to give their time and resources toward your cause. A well-designed, engaging website can expand your reach and power your fundraising goals. How can you enhance your website to meet your goals and connect with donors? You can identify any site issues and improve your site’s donation experience through the practice called user experience design.

User experience (UX) design is a process that allows a person or organization to meet the needs of their audience and business through thoughtful research and design. UX design can be applied to a website, mobile application, or any interface that has a user.

You can achieve your nonprofit fundraising goals with UX design practices and the expertise of UX designers. If you want to increase monthly donations or target a specific type of donor, UX design can identify and implement solutions.

Here are a couple of points to consider when starting the user experience design process for your site.

Understand Your Target Audience

Ask yourself, ‘who is your target audience?’ This is an important marketing and UX design exercise because you can list out the qualities of your target audience. A few questions to get you started are:

• Where does your target audience live? This answer may be local, national, or global.
• How does your target audience interact with you? Do they volunteer, become a monthly donor, or buy merchandise to support your mission?

Another helpful exercise in understanding your target audience is to create user personas. User personas are commonly used in UX design. You can create a simple user persona by considering the following:

• Demographic data
• Goals
• Frustrations or pain points
• A photo to visualize and empathize your persona

User personas help teams imagine how someone will use their website - and what information and functionality they need to use it best.

These exercises can serve as the foundation for starting your user experience design process. You can improve your personas by using the data of your current donors and volunteers, which are available through your CRM and through your website analytic tools.

For the best user personas, you should also talk with your donors and volunteers to understand their motivations - and their pain points. The most trusted user personas are created with a combination of website data and 1-on-1 interviews to understand your donors’ needs and goals. You can use this guide to understand how to discover information about your audience.

Tailor Your Website to Meet Donor Goals

You understand your donors’ goals because you’ve created personas, reviewed your donor data, and spoken with your target audience. It’s time to review your site and find opportunities to connect with your potential donors and volunteers.

An excellent place to start is to look at your website homepage. What does the visitor see when they land on the homepage? The homepage should quickly connect to your target audience’s goals. For example, your donor wants to see the impact of their donation. The homepage could display an impactful data point like “100,000 meals served to people” to convey your impact. You can find out other research methods to design your site for your audience with this guide on the role of good customer research.

4 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Website Experience

1. Highlight your main call-to-action (CTA)

What is the primary action you want your audience to take? Whether it’s to make a donation or sign a petition, the main action should be above-the-fold on your homepage. Above-the-fold is a term that describes your site’s space that visitors see before they have to scroll down. The main CTA should also be a button to draw attention to it and make it easier for visitors to understand this is the action you’d suggest they take. Ideally, you should place the button above-the-fold of the site page.

2. Simplify your menu navigation

Another element of your site that you can review is the main navigation menu. Your navigation provides access to all the main pages of your site. Is the main navigation organized in a way that makes sense to people who arrive at your site? Does it make it easy for them to find the information they need about volunteering or donating? This a great opportunity to put yourself in the shoes of your persona. The user personas should have quick access to the pages they want to see, and they should easily understand the main menu language.

3. Optimize your donation page

If you want to create a seamless donation experience, you can find ways to improve the donation page’s design. One thing to focus on is to reduce the number of steps it takes to complete a donation. Your donation page should have clearly labeled fields to enter donor information. You should remove any unnecessary fields that may frustrate or confuse the visitor. With these points in mind, you can remove some of the common obstacles people encounter when donating to a nonprofit.

4. Conduct a UX audit

You’re on your way to increasing donations on your nonprofit site. If you want to dig even deeper into the UX of your site, then you should conduct a full UX audit. A UX audit can identify areas on your site to optimize that directly impact your nonprofit’s growth and donations. You can run a UX audit or hire an expert to conduct a UX audit for you. At Experiment Zone, we’ll conduct a UX audit on your key pages along the donor journey and find solutions to increase donor giving. Contact us to learn about our UX audit process and take a step toward improving your donor giving