How Donation Page Accessibility Affects Payment Processing

Potential donors visit your nonprofit’s website to learn more about your mission and how to get involved. After all, your site is the hub for your online engagements, declaring your core mission and big picture plans. Users navigate your pages for pertinent information, and if your cause does resonate with them, they’ll be searching for ways to give — your donation page.

Your donation page is where your donors begin the giving process and submit their payment to help push your organization’s mission forward. However, in order to collect payments and encourage online engagement, your website must be accessible and support a streamlined donor journey.

Web accessibility means that all web users can use and navigate your site, regardless of location, device, browser, language, or ability. This ensures that supporters can engage and contribute to your cause, not just passively interact with your page. On your donation page, all content including your forms, payment processor, and other elements, should be fully accessible.

To make your donation page as accessible as possible and streamline the online payment process, we’ll go over the following topics:

Donation Page Accessibility: Optimizing For All Devices
How To Promote A Straightforward Donor Journey
Ensure Your Payment Processor Is Accessible And Secure

Let’s start with best practices regarding your organization’s donation page accessibility.

Donation Page Accessibility: Optimizing For All Devices

When your nonprofit’s web pages are responsive on multiple types of devices, more people can likely access your donation page and complete their gift. After all, according to 360MatchPro's recent fundraising study, mobile users made up over 33% of online donations last year alone. On top of that, half of all visits to nonprofit websites came from mobile devices, and mobile-friendly donation pages yielded 34% donations.

While most content management systems have the functionality to create mobile-optimized pages, here are some quick tweaks you can make to your donation page to ensure it is accessible for all devices, whether it’s a mobile phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer:

Design your page with large text and buttons
Maintain a vertical layout
Implement a sticky navigation menu

For best results, play around with different browsers and devices to ensure accessibility for your visitors. Be sure to check out Google’s mobile-friendliness tool for a streamlined process for doing so.

How To Promote A Straightforward Donor Journey

Understanding your donor’s journey on your website, which starts at your homepage and ends at your donors using your payment processor, is crucial to receiving donations.

Accessibility and user experience go hand in hand. When you streamline the donation process and make it as intuitive and easy as possible, you have a much larger chance of a completed gift and online payment. And, when your content is as accessible as possible, you improve the user experience.

So, to streamline the donor journey for your users, you must ensure that your donation page and the rest of your website is as accessible as possible and intuitive as possible. Here’s what we recommend:

Lead users to your donation form in a straightforward way.

If you’re expecting searchers to patiently click through your website in search of the donation form, you’re in for a bit of bad news. Give or take, users only pay 8 seconds of attention to a web page.

Proper accessibility practices keep you from wasting those precious seconds. As soon as visitors land on your website, they should know exactly how they can give. Be sure to make use of the following:

A dedicated Donate Now button
Quick connections to popular pages within your navigation menu
Calls-to-action (CTAs) on key pages to spark inspiration

CTAs function to ensure that your donors can take action and give right when they’re inspired. This way, they’re more likely to click on it!

Limit distractions

Now that you’ve got users to your donation page, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to actually complete their gift. Make it as clear as possible that their next step is to donate. Do not distract your users at any point during their final steps in giving to your organization.

To complete this process effectively, remove any nonessential CTAs or links leading away from your donation page to keep them focused on your donation form. Your other endeavors (like upcoming group events or campaigns) for the organization are important, but you should save these opportunities for a different point in the donor journey.

Embed your online donation form.

One important way to streamline the donation process is to keep supporters on the same page. Don’t direct them to a third-party site to fill out their personal and payment information!

Make sure you embed your donation form on your donation page. This way, your donors stay on your donation page and can rest assured that the form they are filling out belongs to your organization.

Embedding your online donation form is a simple way to improve user experience and tweak your growth strategy in order to make your page as accessible as possible for those who want to push your mission forward.

Format your donation page to match your branding.

According to iATS Payments’ guide to donation forms, you can lose donors on your donation page if the branding doesn’t seem like it fits the rest of the website. This can raise security concerns and cause users to even suspect that the form and payment processor is a scam.

Make sure your branding is consistent throughout your entire website. For effective and coherent branding on your donation page, consider unifying the following attributes:

Font type
Colors
Any imagery
Nonprofit logo
Mission statement

Cohesive branding throughout your website will help establish a positive reputation and establish a sense of trust with your supporters when they give online. This way, your payment processor and donation form won’t look like it is from a third-party system and cause issues with your donor’s trust when they give to your campaign.

Ensure Your Payment Processor Is Accessible And Secure

When encouraging users to give, make sure to invest in a fully accessible, secure, and reliable payment processor. Avoid directing your users to an offsite third-party payment system at all costs. By investing in an integrated payment tool, you keep donors on the same page and provide a positive sense of security when donors are giving to your organization.

Furthermore, payment processing systems can increase your site’s overall accessibility by taking measures to consider donor payment capabilities. Look for the following features when embedding a payment tool onto your website:

Credit Card Acceptance. This is one of the most common types of payment among donors, particularly for recurring gift giving. When your organization is looking into investing in a payment processor, consider a system that accepts a range of major credit card types and doesn’t require extensive hardware checks to accept this payment method.
Direct Debit, ACH, and eCheck. Direct payments are often quicker and simpler for donors, and it’s important to invest in a processor that accommodates this choice by protecting these more vulnerable payment types from data leaks.
International Processing Capabilities. While much of your support might be within your given country or locality, being able to facilitate donations from abroad speaks volumes about your nonprofit’s organization, planning, and future growth endeavors.

When you use an integrated payment tool, make sure to look for one that protects you and your donors’ sensitive information. When giving to your cause, constituents input data like their names, addresses, financial card numbers, and contact information.
Little else is as damaging to your donor’s trust than the mishandling of their data, and security measures such as anti-fraud protection, security alerts, and payment verification services are some of the best tools to safeguard your supporters.

Payment Card Industry Compliance is another helpful measure for determining the safety of a payment processor. Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) is a mandated security guideline upheld by all credit card companies to keep the data of cardholders private when participating in online transactions. You must adopt a donation processing system that follows these standards.

We’ll leave the specific features of your payment services up to your own discretion. The bottom line is to invest in the right payment processor that protects your donors and provides an accessible experience for all users on your organization’s site.

Your organization should always be doing its part in making the web more accessible to all. Start with your nonprofit’s website to open a world of possibilities to your donors. This guide gives you critical tips for moving forward to creating a more accessible world online, as well as providing a positive experience for your donor’s journey in giving to your cause.

Peggah Azarvash, iATS Payments

Peggah is a passionate Sales Executive with 10 years’ experience providing payment solution support and guidance to nonprofits.

She has over 10 years of experience working in the payments industry. Currently, she works as a Sales Account Executive at iATS Payments, where she connects nonprofit organizations to technology and payment solutions that fit their unique needs. She takes pride in providing unmatched levels of guidance and support to her clients.

In her spare time, you can find her found hiking with her dogs, traveling, or volunteering with animals.