Providing Information

We understand that it is not enough to provide an interactive feature in isolation. With a website designed to explain your organization and attract volunteers, it may not necessarily be designed or optimized to channel visitors through your ecommerce process.

Test the effectiveness of the site by sitting people down in front of it and watching them, and by monitoring your statistics. How many people are signing up to volunteer or donate, and how are you impacting this by changing the content or by what you do offline?

Treat your donor relations as thoroughly as you might your media relations. It's more than just keeping good lists and sending the occasional mass message along — it's about communicating why your organization is different, and keeping your contacts informed. It's also about building your list of contacts by collecting information efficiently and unobtrusively.

So once visitors have identified themselves as considering a donation, give them the information they need to feel comfortable and confident their money is being well spent. Prepare some well-written content pages to explain how a contribution will impact the organization, and where the money goes. If you don't have a good message developed to this effect — that every dollar buys vaccine for one more child — then you should.

This information is best presented in a polished tour rich with graphics. If you have video that can bring the visitor into the life of your organization, then so much the better — photographs and video are more intimate and less abstract than print, and more fully involve the visitor. Your goal is to bring the visitor into your world. Given the difference in the impact of the words "collateral damage", and of the shocking human images and the experience of reality that this phrase represents, it is easy to see why they say that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Channeling Traffic Effectively

The Donate Now Link. This should not just be buried in the buttons, tabs and hyperlinks of your navigation, because the donation engine is not just a part of your site. It is your site, and it must be woven completely into your content, navigation and into each page. Think of your entire site as a single, pervasive, Donate Now feature, with each paragraph bringing visitors closer to taking that next step, and each page funneling the traffic closer to your credit card ecommerce form.

Randomizing for Eye Contact. Link to your Make a Donation Online feature from every page. If the link stands out, you can count on visitors directing their eyes to the first time they see it, at which point they have read the link and can proceed to ignore it while browsing the site.

Here, the goal becomes to prompt the visitor to look at your Donate link several more times, bringing the absolute need of your organization to receive donations back to their top of mind. Classical graphic design techniques compel the viewer's eyes to follow a path across the page or screen, and this can be effective at directing visitors' attention to your donation engine.

Another effective way to repeatedly draw attention to the Donation feature is to make it different every time the visitor scans the page. Presenting them with a button they do not recognize, you force the visitor to look at the button each time they load another page. Direct Leap Technologies can install software which changes the text on the link or button, changes the slogan, or embeds a different graphic image each time a page is loaded.

By using our software to randomize the slogans, inline messages, and button graphics, your link generates fresh attention every time it is loaded.

Reinforcing Your Content. Embed a small text box into the content of relevant pages, just like the pull quotes in a magazine, relating the need to donate to your article and providing a conspicuous Donate button. If the page describes your work fighting deforestation, we can place an inline text box randomly choosing a statement "A donation of just ten dollars can save an acre of rainforest from destruction." with a Donate Now button. An evocative graphic accompanied with another randomly-selected slogan should go at the bottom of these appropriate pages.

Making Your Forms Effective

Interactive Form Validation. For donors new to online contributions, native speakers of a different language, or inexperienced with computers — and there are many — organizations should take every possible measure to make sure their donation is accepted smoothly.

Besides prominently posting a telephone number for support, we can create a clickable email link that hard-codes the email subject line, to ensure important messages don't get lost in the shuffle. Good support helps create a positive, trouble-free experience and prevents a donor from getting confused and frustrated, or worse giving up.

Direct Leap can use automatic software to instantly check the interactive ecommerce form to ensure it has been completed fully and correctly. An incomplete or incorrectly completed form (missing a full name or without enough digits for the credit card number) could otherwise be presented with a generic "Transaction Declined" message — which should be prevented without forcing visitors to troubleshoot the process themselves.

Not everyone is an expert on Internet credit card processing, nor should donors have to be. By checking the information they type in, a JavaScript Form Validation feature is like a staff member looking over the donor's shoulder to make sure the transaction happens smoothly.

Donation Mini-Form to Embed in Content Pages. By creating a separate, two-step donation process, the "Step One" donation form becomes short enough to be embedded into some of the normal content pages. By just asking the donor for their name, and email or card type, you provide a more immediate request for action than simply placing a button on your site. Upon clicking "Continue to Step Two", the first set of information is recorded and donor can fill in remaining information to complete the ecommerce process.

Managing Donor Information

Save Information to a Database. Be sure to efficiently collect any information the donor types in, as it is critically important for follow-up and donor retention. We always design custom systems to capture and store absolutely everything that is typed in whether the transaction is completed or not, and we ask for extra details such as contact information, comments, and feedback questions.

Direct Leap can capture donor information to a database in several ways, with the simplest approach being to place an optional survey or registration form on the "Thanks for Donating" page. This registration page can be generated to embed the donor's name, and to campture the information provided in the preceeding ecommerce form, in most cases even using your existing credit card processor.

A more sophisticated approach is to actually capture any information that is submitted — including incomplete or incorrectly completed submissions — to a secure donor database, as a separate step before software passes this information along to the credit card processing service.

This type of "pass-through" database capture allows the ecommerce form to be expanded to include a separate set of contact inforamtion fields or optional survey questions. These might range from "Should we contact you for special campaigns?" or "Please mail me a membership package", to asking for a complete set of contact information, or asking which of the issue-areas or action campaigns hold special appeal to tailor and highlight your messages for each individual donor.

We can even let visitors subscribe to your newsletter right from your ecommerce form, as well as any other form on your website, by just clicking a checkbox.

Mining Emails for Donor Information Is your critical donor information locked up in the body of email messages? We can quickly extract information, currently trapped in emails generated by your ecommerce software or from interactive website forms, into a database for relationship management and form letter software. As long as the messages are formatted predictably, whether it's an archive of a hundred emails or a hundred thousand, we use powerful tools to extract this information in a single step.