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It would be an understandable mistake to assume that increasing online giving starts with fixing the website. Sometimes it does, but increasing online giving is not always a website problem.
Changing the fields on a donation form will achieve very little if the people arriving there have not been given a compelling reason to give in the first place. To get a balanced view of your online fundraising, I think you need to look at the whole journey.
It is difficult to say exactly how much of your traffic on your website should be converting into donors, of course every organisation will be different but as a useful benchmark, the 2025 M+R and Rally study of UK and Irish charities found that the average main donation page converted around 11% of mobile visitors and 12% of desktop visitors into donors. That means that even once somebody has reached the donation page, 9 out of 10 still leave without giving with the percentage for medium and smaller charities being much lower.
I would not treat that figure as a target. Different charities, audiences and campaigns will naturally perform very differently. What it does show, though, is just how much opportunity can exist between attracting somebody's interest and actually receiving their donation.
There are four broad areas that I want you to think about when looking at online income:
How many relevant people you reach.
How effectively you make the case for support.
How easily and smoothly you lead people through the donation process.
How well you retain donors and develop them into regular supporters and ambassadors.
When online fundraising is working well, these four areas support one another. You reach the right people, give them a convincing reason to care, make giving straightforward and then continue building the relationship afterwards. In a successful campaign, they should work together like a well oiled income generating machine.
Of course, things are rarely that perfect. There will be weak points, assumptions that turn out to be wrong and a fair amount of trial and error along the way. The good news is that most of this is fixable, and it does not require some mysterious digital marketing dark art. In my experience, the biggest improvements usually come from getting the basics right with some time and effort, you can find the bits that aren't working.
My advice is to start with the big things.
If you already know your donation form is painfully long, or ifIf your fundraising message is vague, then that needs fixing first. Likewise, if your appeals receive hardly any traffic, changing the wording on the payment button is unlikely to transform your income.
There is very little value in honing and tweaking tiny details when you know there are larger problems screaming at you.
The more interesting situation is when everything appears reasonably good. Traffic is healthy, the messaging seems clear, the donation process looks straightforward and yet, you are still struggling to convert visitors into donors.
At that point, I would suggest you start measuring and user testing.
Instead of looking only at total online income, measure the movement towards it. How many people see the fundraising content? How many continue to the donation page? How many begin the form? How many complete it?
What you are looking for are bottlenecks and drop offs.
If 5,000 people read an appeal and only 50 click through to donate, the payment form is probably not your first problem. If 800 people reach the form and 500 begin completing it but only 80 finish, then you have discovered something very different.
I would start with Google Analytics 4, combined with Google Tag Manager, and track the important stages of the journey. That might include visits to appeals, clicks on Donate buttons, donation form starts and completed donations.
I would track these as separate events. The aim is to see how people move through the journey rather than simply knowing that they visited a page.
You can also use behavioural tool such as Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar. Heatmaps and session recordings can be incredibly useful because they give you some context around the numbers. Analytics might tell you that people are leaving a page, while a recording might show you that they are repeatedly clicking something that is not clickable, struggling with a field or simply getting confused about what to do next.
Finally, I would strongly recommend some actual user testing. Give five or six people a realistic task, such as, “You have decided to give £30 to this appeal, show me how you would do it”, then watch without helping them. Ask them to talk through what they are thinking as they go.
You will often learn more from half an hour of watching somebody use the site than you will from another afternoon spent discussing the donation journey internally.
Increasing online giving is ultimately about making the whole fundraising system work better. Reach the right people, make a strong case for support, make giving easy and then keep building the relationship afterwards.
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