 All right. Hi, everyone. It's just about three o'clock Eastern time. So before we get started, I just wanted to confirm that everybody can hear me and see my screen. So I'm just going to flip through the first couple of slides. And if you guys could just let me know if you can see me and hear me by entering that in the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel, that would be a huge help. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining me today. We're going to talk about how to create a donation page that works, which is a really exciting topic. And my name is Linda Gerhardt. I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been with the company since 2016. So a few years now. And in that time, I've seen a lot of donation pages and helped a lot of nonprofits set up their donation pages and answered a lot of questions. So this is a topic that I've really gotten to know and I'm happy to share what I know with you today. And here is a quick look at today's agenda for the webinar. We're going to start off by going through some nonprofit donation basics that will inform your nonprofit donation page design and then move into more detailed discussion of how to craft a really awesome donation page. We're going to talk about the essential elements and best practices and also some hurdles that can be caused by the most common donation tool that nonprofits use, the PayPal Donate button. And then we're going to move into how Mighty Cause can help make your donation page even better. And we're going to do a Q&A session at the end of the webinar. So if you have a question while I'm presenting, just type your question into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel and I'll make sure that we make time for it at the end of the presentation. And in case this is your first webinar with us, I just wanted to take a quick minute to introduce Mighty Cause to you. Mighty Cause is a nonprofit fundraising platform that has been around since 2006 when we came on to the CNesRazoo that actually makes us one of the oldest nonprofit fundraising platforms in the industry. And we're also the most affordable. And that's because we're one of the only platforms around that is not funded by venture capitalists. We're an independent company that is interested in providing the best product available for nonprofits at the best price for the nonprofit sector. And our focus is specifically small and mid-sized nonprofits. We've raised more than $650,000 on the platform since we began and we're looking forward to raising even more with our users. So before we dive into the specifics of donation pages themselves, I wanted to dial it back a little bit and talk about the science behind charitable giving because this knowledge is what tends to drive our best practices when it comes to donation procedures. And I wanted to start off with talking about why people give to charitable organizations in the first place, what those fundamental drives are, because understanding those reasons can help us craft successful donation appeals. And while every donor has their own personal individual reasons for giving to a nonprofit, pretty much all donors can fit into at least one of these groups, if not several of them. First, there's giving because of altruism, which is the reason we all hope donors give because of that's the selfless desire to genuinely do good to support a worthy cause and make the world a better place. There's often a touch of altruism and most donors reasons for giving, but believe it or not, pure altruism among donors for nonprofits is pretty rare because it's just pretty rare in people. Most donors, even if they give for perfectly good, valid, legitimate reasons, give because of a sort of impure altruism, which is a term that was coined by economics professor James Andrioni in his paper where he also talked about warm glow giving. Warm glow giving is a kind of impure altruism. And basically it means that people are giving or driven to give to charities because it feels good to them, not out of selflessness and this drive to help other people. But because of the feeling that we get when we do something that we and other people consider to be good. This is a big part of why the thank you is so important in charitable giving. It's because that's what people are chasing. That's their deeper need when they give to get that warm glow, to get those warm fuzzies that make donating to charity feel good for them. A more cynical version of this is giving because of ego reasons. This can look a few different ways and ultimately it results in good, but it can be a major gift donor giving a ton of money to a university to have their name on a building or a wing of a building. It can look like a bequest that puts the donor's name on a special or restricted fund. At its highest level, this can be a lot about tax benefits, but it's also about ego. It's a show of wealth and it's leaving behind a legacy. It's being recognized by others for your philanthropy. And for a lot of donors, as I'm sure a lot of you know, that's really important. On a smaller scale, people give for similar reasons of identity, but not quite at a grandiose level, which we see all the time here at Mighty Cause with people contacting us to be sure that their name shows in the donation timeline on a fundraiser. For a lot of donors, it's really important for them to be thought of in a particular way as philanthropic people who care about certain causes and for other people to regard them as that kind of person as well. That's why social media sharing is such an important feature of a fundraising platform. It helps spread the word for sure, but it also allows people to announce to other people that they gave to a nonprofit or a specific fundraiser or that they signed a petition, and that's really important to donors psychologically. They think of themselves as someone who cares about animals or education or a political cause. It's important to their self-concept, and it's important for other people to recognize them as being that sort of person who gives to a particular cause. Another reason why people give to charity is to fend off feelings of helplessness and feelings of guilt. I used to work in animal welfare, and I cannot tell you how many times people told me that they bought their new puppy from a breeder instead of adopting from a shelter, but they donated to the local animal shelter or ASPCA before, and that was before I even had a chance to respond to them about their new puppy and tell them congratulations. It happened all the time because we live in a society where it's nearly impossible to live without causing some degree of harm somewhere, and because we as a society place so much emphasis on the issue of personal choice for problems that are larger and systemic, you'll find people who make these little bargains that involve donating to a charity like I have a big gas guzzling SUV or sports car that I love, but I'll donate each month to an environmental organization, and that helps people feel a little bit better about it, and that ties into the feeling of helplessness. Some people donate to charitable causes because a lot of the issues nonprofits address like homelessness and healthcare and domestic violence and cancer and animal abuse, they can feel really huge and overwhelming and scary, and donating makes us feel like we're doing something about it, and we're trying to move the needle forward in our own small way, and then finally there's a big social aspect to charitable giving, and that can be about social media, but it's more basic than that because sometimes people give simply because someone they know asked them to, and that's basically the whole foundation of peer-to-peer fundraising, and sometimes you don't even need to know the person you're asking how many of us give to someone ringing a bell and taking collections for the Salvation Army during the holidays, and we give just because we walked past them and they were inviting us to, or we agree to add an extra buck or two to our bill for a charity at a grocery store because the cashier just asked us to. A huge part of stewarding is just building relationships with donors, getting to know your donors and engaging them socially, so the social factor in charitable giving is absolutely huge. So the reasons we just talked about are all about the donor's motivations and what drives them, but that's not the sole reason someone makes the choice to give to a particular charity. There are other reasons that are less to do with the donor and more about your nonprofit. If someone wants to give to an organization that helps people with cancer, there are literally dozens upon dozens of organizations people can choose from that will satisfy that urge whatever it is to give to a charitable organization, and these things are what helps them make their decision to give to your nonprofit specifically. First, there's the issue of security. Donors now more than ever are concerned about their security and trust they won't give unless they feel confident that their information will be safe. So that means they're looking to make sure that your nonprofit's legitimate and they're vetting you to make sure you're trustworthy, and it also means making sure that donating is a secure process, which we're going to talk about more in a little bit. Donors also look for impact. People want to feel that the money they're giving is useful and being used in a responsible way. So when they're investigating charities, they'll want to have a clear understanding of what you do as a nonprofit and how you spend donor money. And that ties into the last thing donors usually look for, which is transparency. Does this nonprofit have financial statements available like 990s? Is it clear whether they're tax deductible if I give to them? A lot of people aren't going to spend a lot of time digging through your 990s if you post them on your website, but they will look to see that you have them there. So the more transparent a nonprofit is, the more likely people are to actually make a donation. All right. So now that we've got some of the donation philosophy out of the way, we're going to move into a little bit of web design and talk about how you can get people to do what you want them to do on your website so that later on we can talk about how to combine all of the things we've talked about with web design and the science behind charitable giving to create a really awesome, effective donation page. All right. So first, if you want people to make a donation to your nonprofit on your website, your website needs to be functional and designed so that the user can easily get to where you want them to go. We actually did an entire webinar about web design for nonprofits that you can find on our YouTube channel. So if this is something you're interested in learning more about, I really recommend watching that video. But your website should be easy to use and easy for visitors to navigate. It should be intuitive for them to get to the pages they want to get to and use the features that they want to use. Your website also obviously needs to be functional. So if you have broken links, old information, pages and tools that don't function well, you're going to cause people to leave your website and you'll probably lose potential supporters. And sometimes websites can put barriers in front of users that cause them to close out of the page altogether, like really intrusive pop-ups that they can't bypass very easily. And if your site is not mobile friendly, they may not even be able to actually properly view your site. So the first step toward having a good donation page is having a website that works and doesn't place any barriers between the user and actually using your website. So as nonprofit professionals, you're probably all very familiar with the concept of a CTA or call to action. This is, of course, a button or a phrase or a link or something that tells you what you want them to do. They're really important in emails and on social media, but they're also super important in web design. Throughout a website, there are calls to action that tell the user what to do. And these can be as simple as finished creating your account on a retail site. The CTA will be to add things to your cart and to check out. And for a nonprofit, you want to have CTAs that point users toward actions that are meaningful for your nonprofit. So obviously, the big one, the big CTA, is to donate. And you might also have some software asks on your website, like signing up for your email list. You don't want to bury the CTA in a menu. You want it to be obvious and easily accessible. So some places where you'll want to put a key CTA, especially one to donate, are in your navigation bar, which users use to get around your website and find information and access pages, your homepage. You'll want to have buttons throughout the site. We'll talk a little bit more about the placement of those later. And if you have a slider or image carousel with the ability to put CTA buttons in there, you'll want donating to be a primary CTA. One thing I talk a lot about when it comes to nonprofit fundraising and when it comes to web design is the jam study. So some of you may already know about this study because it's pretty famous. But in case you haven't heard of the jam study before, it was conducted by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing Sheena's name. And it was almost 20 years old. It looked at how people, specifically consumers, made choices. The way businesses and retailers often thought about choice was that more options for the consumer was better. So the study set out to determine the role of choice in how consumers made decisions. And how they did that was by testing a display with different kinds of jam that was for sale in grocery stores. One of the stands had 24 samples and the other had just six on display. And they were all available for people to sample. And anyone who took a sample got a $1 coupon for whatever jam they wanted. And that's how they tracked who purchased what. So the display with 24 types of jam got lots of attention. But when it came time to actually make a decision and purchase one of the jams, the smaller display with just the six varieties was more successful in actually helping consumers to make a choice. And that was the opposite of what people previously thought would happen. And the reason for this is that when faced with a large number of different products or options to choose from, they experienced something called choice overload. And that, you know, when they had too many things to choose from, they just chose nothing. They walked away. And this is really important because even though nonprofits are not grocery stores and you're not selling jam, your donors are consumers. And they experience the same type of overload and paralysis when websites give them too many choices. So you need to be deliberate and thoughtful with what you present to them and use your interface, use your user interface well to help guide users to make the decisions that you want them to make. And that means when you have a million CTAs on your website, they all essentially become meaningless. You need to pare down your CTAs to the most important things you want users to do and make sure that people are not, that you're not overloading people with choice on your website. And this is going to be a theme throughout this webinar. So this is a really important part of understanding sort of the philosophy behind donation pages. All right. And with that out of the way, we're going to move onto some details about the essential components of a donation page. So first and most importantly, you want to follow HTTPS protocol and secure your domain. And that means when someone visits your donation page, you should see HTTPS in the browser instead of just HTTP. And most browsers will also have a lock icon next to the URL that lets users know that the site they're on is secure. This seems like an obvious thing, but I've personally visited nonprofit websites where their domain is not secure. And when your site isn't secure, some browsers won't even let you access it, or they'll sound the alarm bells and make you very aware that the page you're on is not secure. So if you're like most people, you're not going to pull out your credit card information or even put your email address on a website that's not secure. Now, the interesting thing here is that with a lot of donation tools like Mighty Causes donation widget in our donation form, the donation process itself is secure because it's done through Mighty Causes and Mighty Causes domain is secure. And it's just embedded on your site. But if someone gets that message that from their browser, letting them know that your domain is not secure, they're not going to donate. So this is a really fundamental and important part of creating a good donation page. So if you haven't done this already, if your domain is not secure, talk to your webmaster and work with them to get that HTTPS protocol in place. Okay. So moving on, a donation page should have an appeal to donors, obviously. It's important to remember that someone who visits your donation page has not actually converted, meaning made the decision to become a donor until after they've completed their donation. So you'll want to treat people who come to your donation page as people who are still in the decision-making process. You can use copy, photos, videos, anything you want to make your case that your nonprofit is worth supporting. On Mighty Causes, this mechanism is actually built into our donation process. You can use custom donation descriptions on donation amounts to describe what those amounts provide. So that gives you the opportunity to use your actual donation tool, whether it's a widget or a form to make your appeal. So for instance, if you're a food bank and $20, for instance, feeds a family of five for a week through your program, that can be a really powerful way to appeal to donors and tie those monetary amounts into your overall messaging and security. And jumping off of that, we also recommend adding specific amounts to donate, which goes back to the issue we discussed in the jam study. If you provide no guidance, no context, no suggestions, people get choice overload because they could theoretically donate an infinite number of amounts and it can trigger something like an existential crisis in some donors. How much do I give? How much is okay to give? What do other people give? I want to give this amount, but is that too little? Oh no, what if they think I'm cheap and that I don't care and so on? It can really stress them out. So providing some suggestions, narrows it down a little for them so that they don't have to fret. They just make a choice based on their budget and that makes for an easier and faster checkout process for them. It just provides a really crystal clear CTA and on the internet with purchases and donations, it's one of the rare situations in life when people desperately want to be told what to do. Donors want to know how much you want them to give and narrow down the choices for them, which is why Almighty caused you're limited to four donation amounts and a custom option. Believe us, we did a lot of legwork and research and testing to come up with this number of choices and we don't really recommend going much further beyond that. So anytime you're tempted to think, oh well, wouldn't it be great if we had seven donation options there instead of four, just think back to that jam study. And just as a note about suggested donation amounts, we really do recommend making these entry-level and accessible. Sometimes nonprofits get tempted to start things out at $500 and that's just not going to work in your favor because if someone is looking at your suggested donation amounts for sort of a frame of reference for how much to donate and you start the conversation off at $500, you're very likely going to price them out of donating. One thing you can do here is look at your average donation amounts and get a feel for how much people typically tend to give in one go and then also think of how many random $500 donations you've gotten. If you're like most nonprofits, that is a once in a blue moon kind of occurrence because most donors at that level are people that your nonprofit already has some kind of relationship with and you've been stewarding for a while. So be realistic with the amounts that you suggest and if you want to be aspirational and bump donors up to a newer level, do it very slightly. You can bump a $25 donor up to $35 pretty easily but you're not going to make a $25 donor into a $500 donor with just the power of suggestion. So just be very intentional with these amounts and make keep it accessible. We also recommend that you have an option to donate monthly on your donation page. The world is built on subscriptions these days. I have about 20 subscriptions to websites and streaming services and boxes and stuff that I barely notice coming out of my account. So if it can work for Netflix and Hulu, it can certainly work for your nonprofit. If you have a really robust membership program with rewards and a different sign-up process, you may want to keep that information on another landing page and maybe direct donors to it as a follow-up ask but on Mighty Cause the option to make a donation recurring is baked right into our widget and forms. And the cool thing is that right now they don't have to sign up for an account through Mighty Cause to set up a recurring donation. It's just as easy as making a one-time donation. There's no additional steps for them in setting up a recurring donation. Again, you want this to be really simple, a quick yes or no question for the donor when they're making decisions about how much she gives since they're in that decision mindset. $10 a month or $20 a month is something a lot of people can manage with no problem and if it's built into that process when they're making those decisions, it can really help you pick up some sustaining donations. Another thing that's really important is to make sure your website is at least mobile-friendly and I just really quickly wanted to go into the difference between mobile responsive and mobile-friendly since that's a common point of confusion. So a mobile-friendly site is a site that is static. It does not change but it looks good and functions on a mobile device like a tablet or a smartphone. A mobile responsive design actually registers the type of device that's being used to view a website and it adjusts to that device. Mighty Cause is mobile responsive which means that most of the images and tools and objects on our platform are dynamic and can move and be different sizes and oriented differently based on the screen that is being used to view them. So we're optimized pretty much for all devices. Mobile responsiveness is the gold standard but you will want your website and donation page to be at least mobile-friendly and obviously the reason for this is that more and more often people don't even use desktop computers or laptops outside of work. They read their email and use social media on their smartphones. So if your site only looks good on a computer and people have to zoom in on their phones to even read what's on your site you're going to be losing some donations. And the final essential component is secure donation processing which is different than site security and HTTPS protocol that we talked about earlier. Even if you build your website from scratch you're probably going to have a third party actually process the donations because there's really no need to reinvent the wheel when that's a really complex process and there are already platforms that do donation processing or transactions very well. You want to make sure that the donation processing is quick and secure and that it doesn't have too many steps. This is also something we've tested extensively at Mighty Cause and if there are too many steps from point A to point B and it's too long or cumbersome for people to complete a transaction they often opt out. So on Mighty Cause you can preview the checkout process without actually making a test donation that's in your donor experience settings. So that way you can see the process firsthand and you can edit yourself and ensure that the transaction is as simple as possible without sacrificing any of the important information that your nonprofit needs. To keep the process as easy as possible you'll want to utilize a donation processor that allows people's browsers to autofill things like their name and their address and their email address. My phone will actually fill out all of my payment information with just a fingerprint verification that it's me and I am furious when I encounter a checkout process that will not let me use that autofill feature. So make sure it's as easy as possible for donors to autofill information from their browsers or their phones and we also recommend making sure that your donation processor has a confirmation screen or thank you message for donors so that they can confirm when they have completed their donations. When someone online processes a transaction whether they're donating or they're buying something and it's not clear that the process has ended and it was successful it can make the donor or customer feel really insecure and it usually results in phone calls and emails from them asking like did my donation go through so all of that can be avoided with a simple success screen which Mighty Cause actually provides for all nonprofit users on our platform and you can customize your thank you page on our platform so that it's in line with your messaging and thanks your donors for their contribution. All right so we're also going to move into some donation page best practices some of this might be a little similar to what we just talked about as essential components but we're going to plow through these best practices. The first best practice is to keep your donation page extremely simple. You want a simple and clean donation page lots of bells and whistles and things to do and things to look at are distracting and you want your donation page to be probably the simplest page on your entire website. This is also one of the few pages where you really don't want users to click around and explore and find new things to read because you want them to stay on the page until they've actually completed the donation so make sure that any links you have on that page are absolutely essential and edit out anything that's not. You can definitely add copy and pictures if you want but we recommend that you keep it laser focused and very deliberate and if you also want it to be skimmable most people don't actually read things they just sort of skim them especially online so you want to make sure that it's easy for someone to skim through instead of reading it in detail. On a web page you have an average of seven seconds to get a user from an intention to an endpoint so you want to keep in mind how quick a time frame that is so that your potential donor doesn't actually bounce from your donation page meaning that they leave the page. We already talked about this a few slides ago but it's best practice to make sure that your donation page is mobile friendly or responsive so that users can easily make a donation from whatever device they happen to be on. As we mentioned if someone visits your donation page on their phone and it's small and they have to zoom in or things look funky because you designed your website for a desktop computer and it doesn't look good on mobile those things act as barriers in front of users that prevent them from doing the thing that you want them to do which is making a donation and again donors may just opt out of the process entirely. Okay so this is a big one and it's a little bit controversial for some people but bear with me a best practice for donation pages is to limit that page to one kind of donation that being a credit card donation. The temptation for many nonprofits is to use their donation page to talk about every single way a donor can help your organization but here's the problem with that it's basically the jam study when you overwhelm people with choices they choose nothing so by shoving every single donation method onto your donation page you're actually losing donors and the other thing to consider here is that even though check donations and the quests are money donations and they're important to your nonprofit you can't actually do those things online so really there's no benefit to listing these on the same page as a form that can be filled out to process a donation online. A donor can't give you cash or in-kind donations on your website they also can't shop on amazon smile or buy stuff from your wish list on your website they have to go to amazon to do that and you want to keep them on your donation page until they've actually completed a donation so keep things like wish lists and requests and checks and cash donations off your website's donation page if you want to highlight these things you should make a landing page for each one that's an individual page for each kind of donation and you can see that for a pause for ability in the slide has actually done that in a sub-menu on its donation page you really just don't want to waste valuable real estate or people's time with things they can't actually do on the website and if you're like oh well we have specific instructions for people who are writing checks and information we want to share with people who are interested in a bequest that is a perfect reason for it to have its own page because even though those things are important they don't affect the people on your donation page to make a donation with your with their credit card right this second it doesn't apply to them they don't need to see it there so that is important just stick to one method and keep all of the other stuff have give it its own little area on your website build a landing page for it but keep your donation page simple and dedicated to one method all right so we've talked about making sure that your cta to donate is very accessible and for that reason the best practice is to put a quick quick link to your donation page in your navigation menu or even above it on your site that means that no matter where someone is on your website they will be able to easily make a donation you'll also want to consider putting it on the upper right corner of your site because that is prime real estate that's where the internet has trained people to go when they want to do something you can actually see how the capital area food bank did that on their website on this slide it's an all cap cta it says donate now and it's in the top right corner of their website in a color that stands out from the rest of their navigation bar so that's a really great example of how you can place a donation button visibly at the top right of the page so that people can easily get to it no matter where they are on your site all right and this is also a little bit repetitive we've talked about this a bit but this bears repeating because it's very important a best practice is to use suggested donation amounts for the reasons we discuss and also to use descriptions of what those amounts provide a universal truth in the nonprofit sector is that most people like to donate things more than they like to donate money a food bank for instance can take $20 and turn it into a tremendous amount of incredible fresh food through their partnerships but even when people know that they usually prefer to take that $20 and go shopping for canned goods for a canned food drive and donate that way even though it ultimately does less good for the food bank and the people they serve and this goes back to what we talked about earlier about impure altruism going to the store and picking out the canned goods and dropping them off to the canned food drive makes people feel better than just donating $20 online that's what gives them the warm glow so using descriptions that explain what each amount you've suggested provides it doesn't do it exactly but it gets donors a little closer to that experience and that warm glow they get when they pick out the cans of food at the store and there was a network of hunger relief organizations that actually took this to a really crazy level with a virtual food drive that created an online store that donors could go through that had little pictures of tomatoes and lettuce and green beans and fresh food and they put them into online carts that looked like carts at the grocery store and it simulated the checkout experience at the grocery store so you don't need to go that extreme you can see in the slide that Casa Juan Diego has done that in a much simpler way with their descriptions on their mighty cause form 50 dollars buys 50 pounds of rice 70 dollars buys a 50 pound bag of pinto beans and so on so just think about what amounts are meaningful and maybe do some math to figure out how those numbers translate into things that people can buy quote unquote buy for your non-profit with their donation and again you don't you want to have a lower end and a higher end with your amounts um Casa Juan Diego starts off relatively small and then goes bigger so that somebody who only has 50 dollars or less to give won't feel priced out of giving another best practice is to limit your checkout steps to the bare minimum again donors are consumers and consumers want to get in and out with as little friction as possible each step you add each question you require adds friction for the donor and it makes it more likely that they will be frustrated by the process or even opt out of it all together so that doesn't mean that you can't ask donors for their employer info or ask for their phone number you just want to pair it down to what's essential for your non-profit to get in the checkout process so if the phone number is essential because you call donors really quickly to thank them but the employer is just something that is kind of nice to have ask for their phone number during the checkout process and maybe ask for their employer information in a follow-up ask definitely testing your checkout process will help you get will help you out and as I mentioned you can do that on mighty cause in your donor experience section and see how long it takes you if there were any parts that felt really cumbersome or painful use that to edit yourself and make that process a little simpler so this is an extension of what we talked about with the one donation method per page you want to treat credit card donations as the default and the reason for that is that it's really simple it's because it's really the only kind of donation people can actually make through your website they can't send you a check through the internet they can't give you cash over the internet they can't give you a bunch of in-kind donations through your website so again when you throw a bunch of different ways to donate and get involved at people they get overwhelmed and they don't know what to do and they tend to opt out so stick to credit card donations as your default and keep all other ways to donate elsewhere like on their own dedicated landing pages so now we're going to go back to some of those things we talked about in the beginning of the webinar about why people donate to charity a best practice is to use copy that appeals to those reasons for giving on your donation page for instance language like join us can appeal to the social reasons for donating and building flattery into the language for the people can really help people who donate for reasons of ego so language like be a hero can make a huge difference in whether or not people convert to being donors on your donation page if you have donation tiers you might want to mention those on your donation page although as we mentioned if you have a really robust program with lots of details you may want to dedicate a page to your donor tiers and keep it simple on the page itself and talking about your mission your impact what you do who you help appeals to the altruistic side in donors and reiterates how important your work is you just really want to finesse the copy here so that it's brief but impactful you don't want a novel on your page but a bit of very punchy intentional copy will help you convert more visitors on your page to being donors and finally we talked about this a bit before but you definitely want to utilize a success or thank you page or window that lets donors know their donation was successful and this is because it closes the loop for the donor and on a really basic level just lets them know that they're finished with the process they don't have to worry about whether or not it went through or go check their bank account as I mentioned before this is built into the functionality of the mighty cause platform so all nonprofits have access to a thank you page they can customize and since our checkout process is optimized even if you don't have anything custom in your thank you page we give them a success screen and thank them for their donation just so that they don't have to worry about it they know the transaction was completed all right so with all of that out of the the way we're going to move into some juicier territory and talk about some of the issues with the most common tool that nonprofits use on their donation pages the PayPal donate button so the first problem with PayPal's donate button is that it is a single use tool it's like a strawberry huller it does one thing and one thing only so a strawberry huller might be useful but a paring knife is much more useful because it can haul strawberries and it can do all sorts of kitchen work beyond that so this is you know if you have a drawer in your kitchen with a bunch of single use tools they ultimately become useless because you can only use them for that one thing um PayPal has sort of become the standard because it's really simple and it just does this one thing but beyond that there's really no benefit to having a PayPal button to your nonprofit it does not give you detailed reporting just a basic transaction report and it doesn't provide a CRM it doesn't help you manage or track donors in any way all it does is process transactions and that is it it's a single use tool the second problem with PayPal is that in most cases it takes donors off your website which as we talked about is not good PayPal's standard nonprofit plan takes users to the PayPal site and has them complete their donation there if you want to use PayPal's API on your website you need to upgrade to pro so there's an additional cost involved with that so generally donors and users on the internet don't like to jump from a website to another website PayPal is relatively trusted by consumers but it's a jarring and unpleasant experience for most users who typically have the expectation of staying on the website they're on for the duration of a transaction and any little barriers like that that you put in front of donors as we talked about it makes it more likely that they will opt out of the process so the next problem is a really big one and it's one that doesn't get talked about enough in my opinion and that's the issue of data and privacy it's important that nonprofits understand that when you use a PayPal button what you're really doing is you're sending customers to PayPal when people use PayPal services to complete a donation to your nonprofit you're asking them to agree to PayPal's terms of service and if you have a PayPal button on your website I'd love to know whether you have actually read through their terms of use for the average user and have thought about the implications for the user so you can always put that in the questions box to let me know if you have read through their terms of service according to these terms they have permission to share user information with third parties and partners of theirs they also have the right to allow third parties to market to your donors and you have zero control over that if they connect PayPal with a social media account like Facebook they also have the right to access information about who the donor's friends are and what businesses or pages they like so there are a ton of issues with this and the unfortunate thing is that nonprofits who utilize this button because it's easy and seems pretty cheap are often not aware of these issues and the donors being asked to use the PayPal button to donate to your nonprofit are also usually totally unaware of the permissions they're giving PayPal to access and use their personal information so if you have a PayPal button I really recommend taking some time to read through their terms of use they're not particularly easy to read but just read them see what they get users to agree to yourself included and think long and hard about whether or not you're comfortable with those terms and asking your donors to agree to those terms the truth about internet services is that nothing is really totally free and if the cost of something seems impossibly low and you as the person who's utilizing that service are not being asked to pay a fee usually the trade-off is allowing companies to monetize your data and that is exactly what PayPal does moving on another issue with PayPal is that you can't customize it you can't make it blend into your donation page a PayPal button looks like what it looks like and there's really nothing you can do about it it's kind of an eyesore in my opinion and when you plant a PayPal button on your page you're not only sending them customers but you're advertising their business you're advertising their brand and their company instead of yours they've got their logo on there and yours takes a backseat so you're providing free advertising for them and furthering their brand instead of your nonprofits and finally the last problem with PayPal is that it's something that seems like it's easier but it actually adds administrative burden for your nonprofit as we mentioned they do one thing and you'll get a report of your transactions so sending out tax receipts that's on you thanking donors is on you there's no way to automate it through their service and this may not seem like a huge deal when your nonprofit is on the small side but as you grow this is the sort of thing that can be a real hindrance and burden on your nonprofit and eventually you'll want to move up to something that is a little bit less of a strawberry huller and more of a multi-tool and that brings us to the options Mighty Cause has for donation pages so setting up getting set up on Mighty Cause is free and it gives you access to a full fundraising suite that includes peer-to-peer team and event pages, comprehensive reporting and fundraising tools like our donation widget which we're going to talk about more in a minute you also have the ability to customize your page and really show off your nonprofit's brand and you can create beautiful sleek nonprofit profiles for year-round fundraising as well as campaign specific pages our pricing is really transparent and simple we have two pricing plans our free starter plan and our advanced subscription plan for $99 per month which gives you access to additional fundraising tools so it's easy to understand there's no hidden costs in there and it makes it easy for you to choose the best plan for your nonprofit based on your needs and your budget there's no contracts and the price won't change on you so again there won't be any surprise fees you have these two options and that's it so I want to briefly go over the two main options available to nonprofits that will help you build a donation page that converts more visitors into donors with both of both of these options the donations and donors are fed into your donations report on Mighty Cause so it's tracked on your normal donations report added to your CRM tool if you have a subscription to advanced so those feed into they talk to each other is fed directly in there so you don't need to do any extra work to move donors from one program to another if it's on your website they complete their donation there it'll be tracked on Mighty Cause the option that is available to all nonprofits on our platform including people who are on the free starter plan is the donation widget which is available to everybody the widget is an iFrame that you embed on your website and an iFrame if you don't know is kind of the same code as embedding a YouTube video it's just a little snippet of code and it puts a box on your site and it's just three windows to complete a donation so it's very easy and simple it's totally secure again even if your website is not and it's a great free way to upgrade your PayPal button the cool thing about this is that since it's very space efficient it's just a box you can embed the widget on any page where you'd like to collect donations so you're not limited to your donation page you could have a donation form for your donation page and then place widgets elsewhere to make sure that you capture donations everywhere you want to the widget also keeps people on your page since they complete the donation through Mighty Cause within that iFrame so they don't need to go anywhere else they don't need to log in anywhere it keeps them on your page in that iFrame and the whole transaction takes place in that little box with a subscription to advanced you have access to embeddable donation forms which is a new feature for us a donation form can be embedded on your donation page with that little bit of code we talked about and it pulls in Mighty Cause's secure checkout process as well of all of your custom options from your nonprofit settings and your theme colors and branding choices so it can really blend seamlessly into your nonprofit's donation page on your website and you can plop it right onto a page where you add copy pictures whatever you want to add to make your appeal to donors this will also pull in your thank you page so it's really taking all of the things we talked about in this webinar and making them easy for your nonprofit to actually make them happen on your website this form we actually text tested extensively to make sure that our form was optimized to get donors in and out as efficiently as possible so this donation form is one that you really don't have to think about a whole lot once you choose your settings on your nonprofit profile again the donors feed right into your Mighty Cause account so they're tracked there and we send the tax receipt to donors and include them in your regular disbursements and our comprehensive donation report so makes it a lot easier than PayPal you just put that on your site log into your Mighty Cause account and all of the donors are tracked there so I really recommend if you are currently using a PayPal button ditching that button and giving Mighty Cause a try instead you get really just so much more from using Mighty Cause you get access to all of our fundraising tools including events peer-to-peer all the backend tools to track and manage donors and with our new pricing guarantee we're actually less expensive than PayPal the effective rate for nonprofits who have opted into the pricing guarantee which you can do in your settings is 1.8% plus 29 cents per transaction which is cheaper than PayPal's minimum of 2.2 plus 30 cents per transaction so it's really cost effective and we're able to do that and support ourselves so that we don't have to surprise you with any fees or change our rate it's a flat rate none of our tools take donors off your website again they're designed for the explicit purpose of keeping them on your site and crucially we never ever ever sell or share your donor's information with anyone else and we as a company only ever send them emails that are transactional like sending them receipts or notifications that a recurring donation is about to process so your donor's information is secure with Mighty Cause we are not using that information we're not selling it and we're not monetizing it you get control over the checkout process and donation process so you can make it custom to your nonprofit and the other great thing is that we have a staff of customer support folks who are there to help your nonprofit and your donors if they have questions if you've ever tried to contact PayPal support then you know that that is a little bit lacking but we have a staff that's available to help you and also help your donors with an advanced subscription you get a lot of really awesome tools to help grow your nonprofit all for $99 per month you can pay that annually or monthly it's up to you and there's no contract either so you're not locked in for that price you get our supporters CRM tool to sort of track and manage your donors in a little bit more of an advanced way analytics so you can quickly pull your donor retention rate and you can also add a google analytics tracking there's a lot of great information in analytics text to give which is a new feature that we're really excited about data integration so you can connect your mighty cause account to constant contact sales force mail chimp and more volunteer management tools and the list goes on and on we do offer free trials of advance that go for 30 days so you can test these tools out and the really cool thing is that you don't need to give us a credit card to get a free trial so that you don't need to cancel anything to avoid being charged it's a totally free trial and if you upgrade during the trial you won't be charged until it's over you'll get the full 30 days for free so there's really nothing to lose by trying out advance for 30 days if you want to get started just let us know email us at support at mighty cause dot com you can also ask me linda my email address is linda at mighty cause dot com all right so that is the end of the presentation i did want to make some time for questions we've got about 10 minutes for questions um so if you have something you want to know more about um just type it into the questions box of your go to webinar panel see what we've got already here oh okay so this is a question about advance do you have to sign up for a year or can i sign up month to month um so for advanced um you don't you you are not locked in for a year you don't have to sign up for a year's worth of advance um you are you can be charged month to month um but if you don't want to keep your advanced subscription you just need to let us know and we can take you off advance and move you back to the starter plan so um just let us know if you don't want to stick with it we'll talk to you about why um but you can move back to the starter plan if you'd like um you're not locked in with a contract all right so oh this is a good question we find that some of our donors have really strong preferences for PayPal so we have both the widget and the PayPal button on our site do you recommend taking the PayPal button off the site and what should we tell users donors rather that want to use PayPal that's a really interesting question um so yes i would recommend taking the PayPal button off your site and just sticking to one method um the great thing about using Mighty Cause is if that a donor wishes to pay using PayPal they can use PayPal they are not stuck with using a credit card if they have a PayPal account they can check out with their PayPal account so um i would take the donate the donate button off and just use the widget see how that works you can also try out a donation form if you wanted to get a free 30 day trial of advanced all right let's see what else we have for the widget embedded onto our website would it only have the main donation option available how do you incorporate multiple donation options with the Mighty Cause widget on the website um so in terms of you can clarify for me in terms of donation options they can choose you know what card they pay with they can choose if they want to pay with PayPal um if they choose to do it that way um so in terms of donation options they have all of the custom options the amounts that you've set through your Mighty Cause page on the widget so that will just move over to the widget it'll be right there in the widget um and they have all of the credit card payment options they could want so there's really you know aside from checks and cash and in-kind donations they have all of the options they would need and if they want to enter a custom amount they can enter a custom amount through the widget as well so um they're not locked into anything you can actually see a preview of what the widget looks like if you go to let me actually find it for you um it's on some of these slides this little guy right here this little button that is the um button that will take you to the embeddable options so if you want to take the widget for a ride um you can see what it looks like there but it pulls in your donation options it used to be that it was stuck with the four amounts the $25, $50, $75 and 100 but now it's actually able to pull in your custom um amounts that you set in your Mighty Cause profile so that might be the reason for your question but um that is a change so we updated the widget you're no longer stuck with $25, $50, $75 and 100 it'll pull in your custom donation amounts um but you can always email me later if I misunderstood the question after a person donates is there a share button where they can put it on social media yeah they can definitely do that um they are not aggressively prompted to but they certainly are given the option to share on social media and if you have your social sharing settings set up properly you can add hashtags if you're using twitter you can also tag your nonprofits so that you know that they shared um people do really use that option I monitor our twitter page and people constantly are sharing pages that they donated to um so yeah they are prompted to um they have the option to share to social media so that you can get some additional um exposure and spread the word of mouth all right so can you share volunteer opportunities using the software and allow the community to sign up for volunteer opportunities yeah we um that is a an advanced tool called calls to action um that is our volunteer management tool and um you can post volunteer opportunities and allow people to sign up there's also a file upload option so if you have a waiver for them to sign um you can include that information there um that is an advanced feature so if you are interested in volunteer management I would definitely recommend checking out a 30 day trial of advanced and seeing if that tool meets your needs um but yeah it allows you to post and share volunteer opportunities with people and it'll also do cool things like before their volunteer opportunities starts if they're you know helping out an event an event or something like that it sends them an email reminder through our system so that you don't have to get on the phone and say hey remember you signed up for this thing tomorrow are you going to be there our system will remind them so that's another cool option that's in the volunteer management tool which is called calls to action so um that's available with advanced so if you are interested in that I definitely recommend getting a trial and testing that out okay is there a feature that will send automatic dues renewal for members so that's kind of a tricky one we used to do annual donations at this point we only do monthly recurring ones because what we would find is that with an annual donation people forgot about it so they would think that you know there was some fraud action on their card so what we offer now is a monthly recurring donation we don't do annual donations what you may want to do is think about splitting your annual dues up into monthly amounts and having them set that up through mighty cause because it'll withdraw automatically every month and if you're you know you have dues of $200 just split that into 12 and ask them to pay on a monthly basis but that we don't have an annual option right now just because we found that users weren't weren't having an easy time with it because they always forgot about it they would call their bank think someone's using their card they would do a charge back so it was just something that was not as useful as we would have hoped but you can do a monthly option do you use do you use fast action to auto fill donor info um so it's done through the browser so i'm it depends on what browser a user is using so if they're using chrome chrome has some auto fill options same with safari and if somebody is for instance using a phone where they have their payment information say if they can auto fill that way so it really depends on what the user is using i don't know if the exact mechanism because i'm not a development person but i can certainly find out if that's important for you to know um just email me at lynda at mightycost.com and we can chat about what those that mechanism is so that i can ask our developers because honestly i don't know um all right so there's one more question um does the widget have a wordpress plugin um that's a good question so we don't have a plugin but because it's just an iframe embed um you just go into the code on your your website um you have the the sort of the visual editor and the html or text editor just go into the text editor and plug in that code and it'll populate on whatever page you're trying to put it on so it's really easy to do um i am a you wordpress user so if you have any questions about that um you can always come to me lynda at mightycost.com but it's it's super easy just go into your text editor and plop that code in there um let's see can you only use the embed feature on your own site if you're an advanced member so you can embed the widget if you have just the starter plan um if you want the full form they just look a little different the widget is this little guy right here and then the form is a little bit of a longer guy right here so they look a little bit different but you can use the widget on the free starter plan um and if you want to use the form you do need a subscription to advanced um but you don't to embed something on your site you don't need a subscription you can just use the widget if you wanted to upgrade to the form you would just need to have an advanced subscription um and you can also get a free trial if you want to try that out and see what works best for your donation page that is an option that is available to you all right so it is 357 eastern time so i'll go ahead and wrap things up thank you guys so much for coming to this webinar today if you have any further questions if you're interested in a trial if you have more questions about paypal if you want to know anything related to donation pages feel free to reach out to me my email is linda at mightycost.com and i am here to assist you um but thank you guys so much for all of your great questions and sticking with me through the hour-long presentation i hope you have a great rest of your day