Asking a digital donor to provide their mailing address at checkout has its pros and cons. But now, some new settings in Fundraise Up help balance capturing mailing information with netting maximum conversion.

To ask or not to ask, that is the question

Mailing addresses: on one hand, it’s nice to have them for stewardship, segmentation, and wealth screening purposes.

But on the other hand, digital-first donors might not be interested in receiving stuff in the mail, especially if they’re people who are constantly on the move. That disinterest, paired with other negative factors, can drive down conversion.

Last year, we studied the address collection step in donation forms. The behavior of 47,000 donors revealed that when an organization required providing a mailing address, it dropped a donor’s likelihood to give by 10.6%.

The conversion impact was worse for donors outside of the U.S. For these donors, the address requirement dropped their likelihood to give by a staggering 18 percentage points.

One way to deal with this conversion loss would be to eliminate the address ask altogether.

But what about the donors who do provide their address details and convert without issue? You don’t want to miss out on a chance to secure those details.

And in some cases, your country’s government might even require you to collect address information, especially for larger donations sizes.

The new mailing address settings in Fundraise Up make it easy to tackle these scenarios.

New settings in Checkout

Previously, there were two settings for address collection in Fundraise Up.

You could choose to show or hide the address screen and select whether a donor would be required to provide the information.

The new settings let you define conditions for asking or requiring a donor to provide their mailing address.

Ask when a minimum amount is met

With the new settings, you can set a minimum amount that will trigger the ask for a mailing address. For example, you might ask a donor to provide their mailing address only if they’re donating $500 or more.

As a baseline, avoid asking donors for their addresses when they’re giving $100 or less. This will help preserve conversion.

Require when a minimum amount is met

We’ve also introduced a minimum amount trigger for requiring a donor’s address.

This is useful if your gift acceptance policy requires collecting address information at a certain level, or if there’s a regulation in your country that requires address collection for large gifts.

Mailing address options

So with these new settings you can now:

• Show/hide the address screen
• Require a donor to provide their mailing address
• Set a minimum amount trigger for showing the address screen
• Set a minimum amount trigger for requiring a donor to provide their mailing address

And because these settings are applied at the Checkout level of your campaigns, you have a lot of flexibility for choosing where and how you want to make the address ask.

More address collection optimizations

The new conditional logic settings aren’t the only tools optimizing the way you collect mailing addresses. Here are two other address-related features that help you fundraise:

Address autocomplete

It’s easy to take address autocomplete for granted—it’s built into the checkout experiences of most modern web shops. And it makes sense why.

According to Loqate, an address verification service, address autocomplete can significantly increase conversion.

Unfortunately, many donation forms don’t include it as a way to help donors input their mailing addresses.

Not only do we help donors input their mailing information by auto-completing address details, we use their location data to display the most relevant address results first.

We even leverage country-specific address services to cover scenarios where donors search for addresses by first looking up the address’s postal code instead of its street number.

Address validation

There’s little value in collecting an address if it’s not correct.

Thanks to address autocomplete, the likelihood of capturing a valid address is already high, but to ensure that you have clean, usable address data, we run each address through a validation service and report its level of deliverability within your Fundraise Up account.

That information can be synced to your CRM using one of our integrations or exported and sent to your direct mail partner. This automatic process helps reduce mailing costs by optimizing your recipients list.

Address requirements based on locale

In countries like Canada, collecting a mailing address is always required at checkout. So for organizations fundraising there, we make sure that a donor’s mailing address is always captured.

Similarly in the UK, if a donor declares Gift Aid on their donation, the recipient organization has to collect the donor’s address information. When a Gift Aid declaration is made using Fundraise Up, we automatically show the address screen and mark the address fields as required.

How to use the new conditional logic settings

If you’re already using Fundraise Up, log in to your account and head to Campaigns > [Example Campaign] > Supporter. There, you can toggle the address collection options that make the most sense for your organization.

And if you’re not yet using Fundraise Up on your website, get started by setting up a call with our team.

About Fundraise Up

Fundraise Up is a technology company unlocking the world’s generosity potential by optimizing how people give. Our donation platform helps nonprofits engage more supporters and grow revenue by providing easy ways to increase conversion, enable modern payment methods, and personalize the giving experience for every donor. Fundraise Up is the partner of choice for UNICEF USA, The Salvation Army UK, American Heart Association, and other impactful organizations across the globe.