Giving Tuesday is December 1 this year. Your emails are drafted, your social graphics are in review, and maybe you’ve lined up a match. All of that work ends in the same place: your donation form.
At a live form audit for AFP in August, Fundraise Up’s Danielle Rice asked attendees a question. Do donors arrive already decided, so the form only has to take the gift? Or is the form where they make the decision? “It was a trick question,” she said. “The answer is both.”
Donors expect to move quickly, and they also want to know who they’re giving to and what their gift will do. That’s the lens for the six fixes below. Each one makes your form faster, clearer or more trustworthy, and you can finish any of them in November.
1. Turn on digital wallets
More than half of donations are now made on mobile, according to the Pulse of the Donor report from Fundraise Up and Stripe. On a phone, typing a 16‑digit card number is where many gifts stall. Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal let a donor give with a tap.
What to check:
- Turn wallets on for one-time and monthly gifts. Wallets are often only switched on for one-time gifts, even though they work for monthly, too.
- Show the right button for the device. iPhone users shouldn’t see Google Pay, and Android users shouldn’t see Apple Pay.
- Test a real gift on an iPhone and an Android phone before December 1.
2. Pre-select a default amount anchored to impact
An empty “other amount” box looks generous, but it hands the donor a math problem. Rice explains that it “actually causes a moment where they have to pause: ‘Okay, what’s my budget? What am I thinking?’”
Pre-select an amount when the form loads, and tie each amount to an outcome. To pick the default, anchor it in your prior giving amounts, then test 5% or 10% higher. If your platform can personalize suggested amounts for each donor, use that.
Then make sure the impact math matches the buttons. At the Monthly Giving Summit, Dana Snyder, founder of Positive Equation, reviewed a form where a $300 gift sent a child to camp but none of the buttons matched that story. Her suggestion: offer $25 a month as the way to send a child to camp for a year. The goal is “bridging the stories with the dollar amount so that they feel connected and not siloed.”
3. Move phone and address to after the gift
On one form Rice’s team audited from a community land trust included a single screen that held 29 fields, and 12 of them were required.
You may need phone numbers for SMS and addresses for direct mail. The real question is when you ask for them. Let the payment go through first and ask follow-up questions after it, or collect the details later in a welcome email or donor portal.
This week:
- Count the required fields before the payment step.
- Move phone, address and “how did you hear about us” to after payment.
- For fields that stay, make sure browser autofill works.
4. Keep the form on your own domain
When the URL changes partway through a gift, donors notice, even if you don’t. “Your donor is not in fundraising,” Rice said. “To them, it’s gonna feel like, ‘Hey, that URL changed. Am I in the right space?’ This is increasingly important with how much fraud there is going on.”
The fix is to embed your form on your site, or use a checkout that opens on top of your page, so the donor never leaves your domain. Then add the trust signals donors look for. Your logo should be visible on mobile without zooming, and the privacy language should be plain.
Mike Stafford, VP, director of development, operations and analytics at the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, put it simply: “At the end of the day, we’re asking donors to enter their credit card information on a website. And the cleanliness of the experience from start to finish along with the appearance of the platform cannot be overlooked.”
5. Set up abandoned-cart recovery
Someone who started a gift and stopped is much warmer than a cold prospect. “If you’re not attempting to capture abandoned donors … you’re leaving money on the table,” Stafford said.
After the food bank turned on abandoned-gift recovery, it recovered 32% of abandoned donations. Those were gifts, Stafford said, “that we were absolutely not capturing previously.”
To set it up:
- Send a short sequence: one email right away, one a day later and one a couple of days after that.
- Link straight back to the form. Keep the copy short and personal.
- During Giving Tuesday, add a real deadline when you have one, such as a match that ends at midnight.
6. Call it “monthly,” and say it the same way everywhere
Subscription-native donors find recurring gifts normal. Many traditional donors read words literally. For them, Rice says, “monthly is what they expect to hear because it literally sets the expectation around what is about to happen.”
Use the same term in every channel. If you call it monthly on the form and it’s called “sustainers” in an email, it’s confusing. And don’t forget to give your monthly amounts impact framing. One-time amounts often have impact descriptions but the monthly amounts don’t, and that’s a miss.
And at the end of the day, you just have to ask. At the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, more than 250 of 728 new recurring donors in a year came through pre- and post-donation upsells that invited one-time donors to give monthly.
One more setting while you’re in there
If you offer fee coverage, check the wording. At the food bank, 85% of donors now cover transaction costs. Fundraise Up’s Bryan Funk advises: “Let them know that they’re covering fees and what they’re going towards, and just be really clear, because clarity is what builds trust.”
Your November checklist
- Wallets on for one-time and monthly, tested on two phones
- Default amount pre-selected and tied to impact
- Required fields before payment counted and cut
- Form stays on your domain from start to finish
- Abandoned-gift emails switched on
- “Monthly” used on the form, in emails and on thank-you pages, with impact framing on monthly amounts
Want a second pair of eyes before December 1? Book a free donation form audit and our solutions team will review your form like a donor would, with no system access needed. Or watch the full live donation form audit recording with Danielle Rice and Bryan Funk.