6 Fresh Ideas for Your Station’s “Thank You” Landing Page

Reposted with permission from Nonprofit Tech for Good.

Each time @NonprofitOrgs reaches a 100K-follower benchmark, Nonprofit Tech for Good donates to various nonprofits. It’s a way to give back, but its also a system used to periodically review how nonprofits are innovating their online giving process. In this last round of donations, $25 to 28 nonprofits ($700 for reaching 700K followers), some progress has been made since the last round of donations made at 600K followers. More nonprofits are streamlining their online giving process and using more visuals to communicate their gratitude to donors.

A “thank you” landing page is the page that donors land on after their donation has been made. It’s an important page because it is one of the few times you have the hyperfocused attention of your donors as they wait for their credit card payment to be processed and confirmed. Yet surprisingly it is one of the most overlooked web pages on a nonprofit’s website. Most “Thank You” landing pages appear as though they haven’t been updated since the early 2000’s, but as many nonprofit have launched new responsively designed websites since the last round of donations, “Thank You” landing pages are slowly but surely getting redesigned to accommodate today’s mobile and social donors.

Important: It was shocking how many nonprofits I wanted to donate to, but couldn’t because of bugs in their donation process. Ten out of 38 nonprofits had bugs in their donation process that prohibited donations from being successfully completed. That’s a 26% failure rate! PayPal was the worst. Five of the ten nonprofits that I wanted to donate to did not receive donations because of a PayPal bug. If your station has not donated to itself in the last few months, I highly recommend you do so immediately and then commit to doing so at least once monthly to both discover bugs and always have in the forefront of your mind the donor experience and how it can be improved.

1. Prominently feature a “thank you” video.

2. Add a poll asking donors what prompted them to give.

3. Use images to bring attention to calls-to-action.

4. Add large, colorful social network icons.

5. Enable donors to share their donation with their social networks.

6. Allow donors to designate their just-made donation as a tribute/honor gift.