Better Design Nets Charity More Online Donations

Officials at the American Heart Association didn’t think that redesigning the donation section of the

organization’s Web site would be a big deal. A few quick design changes, some tweaks to fix the bugs in the system, and that would be that.

But instead, the Dallas charity took a new approach that focused on the needs of donors — and tested design changes thoroughly.

The results of the new approach have been considerable. Now, say the charity’s officials, nearly 70 percent of the people who start to make a gift online end up following the process through to completion, compared with only 12 percent before the changes.

Online contributions to the charity — which also include Internet gifts raised by participants in events like charity walks — totaled $20.3-million in 2006, up from $16.7-million in 2005.

The first step of the four-month project, which began in the summer of 2005, was to analyze Web-site statistics to get a picture of how donors were using the site. It was in this phase that the organization learned how few people who started the donation process actually made a gift.

“That was the real eye-opener for everyone,” says Christian A. Caldwell, who at the time was a consultant the association hired to oversee the redesign. He now works for the charity full time, helping it make its Web sites more accessible to users.

Asking Questions

To gather more information, the organization conducted a survey. For two and a half months, Web-site visitors who started the online-donation process were asked a series of questions.

At the beginning, the survey asked people why they were at the donation part of the site, and what they wanted to do. Then, when people left that part of the site, the survey asked if they had been able to do what they wanted to do, and their thoughts about the process.

One of the things the survey uncovered was widespread confusion about what constitutes a memorial gift, which is made in honor of someone who has died; a tribute gift, which is made in honor of someone who is living; or a general gift to the organization.

The Web site “used a lot of internal terminology that just didn’t carry a lot of meaning to the end user,” says Mr. Caldwell. “They didn’t realize that when they were doing memorials that they would actually be building a card that could be sent to a next-of-kin for the honoree.”

To remedy the problem, the new design included clearer definitions of each type of gift. Help pages, which donors reach by clicking a question mark icon next to the descriptions, listed the pieces of information necessary to complete each type of gift.

The small group of heart-association employees — comprising both fund raisers and information-technology workers — crafting the redesign also rearranged the order in which donors were asked for the information necessary to make memorial or tribute contributions.

“The very first question that we were asking originally was, ‘How much do you want to give us?’ and then we went right into, ‘Who are you, and where do you live?’” says Mr. Caldwell.

A donor who wanted to make a memorial or tribute gift was there to honor someone who was important in their life, the group reasoned, so the process should start there. Now the first queries asked are who is it the donor wants to honor, and who should receive the acknowledgment card.

Test Runs

To verify that the changes the group had made would make the Web site more effective, the heart association built a prototype and tested it at an Internet consulting company in Irving, Tex.

There, behind a two-way mirror, charity officials were able to watch six women and four men who fit the general profile of the group’s online donors work their way through the new donation process. The test subjects’ path through the Web site was recorded as well.

The organization used their observations from the tests to tweak the new design, which went live on its Web site in November 2005.

According to Mr. Caldwell, the average size of a donation made through the Web site rose from $58 in 2005 to $67 in 2006.

He credits the increases to the user-friendly design and the thorough testing. “It had a lot to do with changing the perspective from our financial department wanting to know how much the donation is to ‘What is it you’re here to do? Who is it you’re here to honor?’” he says.

Gathering the data that guided the redesign wasn’t cheap:The project cost $40,000. But Mr. Caldwell thinks it was money well spent. The data, he says, helped the charity resolve internal debates that had stymied previous Internet projects.

A telling example was the meeting when he reported to the fund-raising and information-technology departments the early finding that only 12 percent of people who started the online-donation process actually made a gift.

“Everybody came with their own ideas about why donors were going away,” says Mr. Caldwell. “Instead of getting into that argument about what the donors’ intentions were, I said, ‘Let’s just take it right to the donors, and try to get them to tell us.’”