Summary

The report answers 3 questions:

• What are prospective donors looking for on non-profit websites when they're thinking of giving money?
• What Web design factors influence which of several similar organizations gets the donation?
• How does certain Web design decisions make donors turn away from a non-profit website?

This work contrast with most other advice on non-profit design, which is based on asking people what they like, as opposed to watching them while they're online. What people say and what they do often differ dramatically.

The report contains 58 guidelines for improving the design of non-profit and charity websites, in two areas:

• Presenting information to entice prospective donors to give money.
• The actual donations process, after a user has decided to give.

> See sample page spreads as thumbnails
> Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox about the usability research

Table of Contents

124-page report with 111 color screenshots.

1. Executive Summary
   • User Research
   • What Donors Want
   • What Kills Donations
   • Integrating Local Chapters with the National/International Site
   • Donation Process: OK
2. Research Overview
3. Usability of Non-Profit or Charity Websites
   • Why Usability Matters for Donations
   • Content on Non-Profit and Charity Websites
   • Information People Need To Know
   • Most Convincing Information
   • Biggest Turnoffs
4. Design Guidelines
5. Homepage
6. About the Charity
7. Asking for Donations
8. Leadership, Sponsors, and Endorsements
9. News & Events
10. Local Chapters
11. Social Media and Interaction
12. The Donation Process
    • General Guidelines
    • Data Collection
    • Information Verification
    • Confirmation Page
13. Site-Wide Guidelines
14. Websites Tested
15. Methodology
    • Tasks
    • Questionnaire
    • Participants

What You Get

• Checklist of 58 specific design recommendations: review your website and your online donation process for these 58 items, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average website typically violates about half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect site in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your design against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don't do anything wrong.
• Description of how donors behave when using a wide variety of nonprofit sites, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were frequently annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the sites we tested.
• The differentiating factors that caused site visitors to give their donations to one nonprofit instead of another in the same sector: both attractive features and donor-repellants are covered, based on the actual behavior of people while they were deciding where to give money.
• 111 color screenshots of nonprofit pages with descriptions of why they worked well for donors or caused them problems in usability testing.
• $50,000 of user research with donors at 0.2% of the cost; find out how real people behave when they use real nonprofit websites.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own design.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design of a nonprofit or charity organization's website.
• People in charge of the organization's communications strategy or Internet strategy.

Running a similar usability study yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of websites would cost more than $50,000.

Please help us continue publishing low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

Remember that we don't get any grants or outside support for our independent research, so we depend on your honesty in buying the report to generate the funding for further work.

Download Report (from eSellerate) $98 for the PDF file (124 pages) $198 for site license to make copies