Accepting donations online empowers donors and encourages donor loyalty. Learn how to build a strong foundation for your donation website and landing pages to build a strong community of donors.

1. Best Practices
in Online Donations
April 26, 2019

2. Our Sponsors
NetSquared is a program of TechSoup Global. Our mission
is to "Mobilize Technology and Communities for Social
Change." Our network of volunteers organize nonprofit
technology meetups and training events with the goal of
helping nonprofits and community groups master
technology.
Provides: Meetup.com account, networking, support to organizers
Impress.org is a local NGO technology company, focused
on building website solutions for nonprofits. Our mission
is to offer "Code for Good". GiveWP is our most popular
product -- a donation platform for WordPress with 60,000
active installs and over 300 5-star reviews, Give is the most
widely used donation solution for WordPress.
Provides: Venue, light lunch, organization

3. Michelle
Ames
Head of Customer Success
MBA in Marketing, E-Commerce, and Information
Systems from University of Rochester
20+ years of experience in higher education
10+ years entrepreneur of web design and
marketing company
Serial volunteer for multiple organizations
Expertise:
● WordPress
● Online Donations
● NGOs

4. Amanda
Gorman
Bachelor Degree in Marketing from SUNY Brockport
10+ years of experience in WordPress
Yoga Teacher and Owner at Flower City Yoga in
Irondequoit
Expertise:
● WordPress
● Online Donations
● Search Engine Optimization
● Social Media
● Content Marketing
● NGOs

5. ● Technical Requirements for Online
Donations
● Considerations for your Donation tools
● Considerations for Donation Forms and
Pages
● Driving Traffic
OVERVIEW

6. Technical
Requirements

7. Technical
Requirements
Quality Hosting
● Updated PHP, cURL, MySQL
● Offers free SSL certificates and installation
● Great and accessible technical support
● Automated Backups outside the root of your
install, and easy to restore
● BONUS: Live Staging environments, Git
integration, WordPress Core and Plugin updates

8. Technical
Requirements
Your Website
● Forced HTTPS
● Consistent domain mapping
(meaning it’s always https://example.com never http://www.example.com )
● SMTP Email with SPF record
Good article overview of SPF Records here

9. Donation Tool
Requirements

10. Tool
Requirements
Security
● Must respect HTTPS protocol
● Must interact with secure payment gateways.
● Own your donation/donor data
Donor Features
● One form, no cart or checkout
● Donation Confirmation with ability to save a
valid receipt. Auto-sending by email a bonus.
● Donor History
● Annual Tax Receipts
● Recurring Donations

11. Tool
Requirements
Admin Features
● Donor management
● Integration with your email newsletter system of
choice
● Reporting
● Logs (Error logs, Activity logs)
Bonus Features
● Fee Recovery
● Currency Switching
● Tributes
● Peer to Peer features

12. Donation
Forms & Pages

13. Donation Form Best Practices
Use as few fields as
possible
Suggest levels or
amounts
Only require the bare
minimum fields

14. Things to Do
● Make the form central and obvious
● Provide context as to how these donations
benefit your organization
● Design the page to be easy on the eyes and
inviting
Things to Avoid
● Adding links to outside sources that take
donors away from the page
● Don’t have newsletter popups on this page
● If possible, don’t have general site navigation
on this page
Donation
Pages

15. Driving Traffic to your Donation Page(s)

16. Driving
Traffic
Fundamentals
● Basic SEO
Meta Tags, Google Analytics, Google Search Console
● Blog -- seriously
● Website Navigation
● Memorable and easy URL
E.g. example.com/give
Get Social
● Social Media (which we’ll discuss in depth next
month!)
● Testimonials
● Volunteer Landing Pages