Maximize Your Nonprofit’s Year-End Giving With Drupal

Authored by: Aaron Christian and Dave Bezuidenhout.

Donations are the fuel that propels your nonprofit mission. And since many donors provide special gifts at the end of the calendar year, now’s the time to take a look at your website and ask three critical questions:

Does your CMS make it easy to facilitate digital-first philanthropy? Is your website designed to inspire donors to take action? And when donors decide to give to your organization, is the process easy, convenient, and fulfilling?

To reach your fundraising goals, you need a powerful, flexible CMS that works in the background to let your mission and vision shine. Here are three specific ways you can use Drupal to support your organization’s fundraising strategies at year-end — and all year long.

1. Create Clear User Pathways That Lead Donors Through the Decision Funnel

One of the biggest challenges nonprofits face is losing potential donors before they ever make a gift. Something in the user experience — whether it’s too many clicks, confusing navigation, or a lack of clear calls to action — causes prospects to drop out of the decision funnel.  

Thankfully, you don’t need to redesign and/or optimize your entire site to get the results you’re looking for. By analyzing quantitative data from Google Analytics and other data-gathering tools, you can see where users are dropping off. Then with Drupal, you can optimize key pages and create tailored user pathways that guide donors through your site. 

A good place to start is to look at the user journey to and through campaign-specific landing pages. 

Around the holidays especially, you’re likely busy planning specialized solicitation campaigns like Giving Tuesday and other year-end appeals. To promote these giving opportunities, you need to quickly spin up landing pages that feel like natural extensions of your main website. 

Drupal’s library of templates and components — and its UI Kit module — allows you and other content editors to customize each landing page with on-brand elements such as images, snippets, banners, carousels, and CTAs. 

You can also embed tailored forms for each campaign using Webform and integrate them seamlessly with your payment platform (more on that in section 3).

The result? A finely tuned user experience that converts interested visitors into engaged donors. 

2. Align Compelling Stories With Giving Opportunities 

Another key part of leading prospective donors toward that all-important “Give Now” button is to tell stories that capture their hearts and minds.

Your nonprofit content strategy undoubtedly focuses on the good work your organization does in your community and in the world. But is it geared toward your audience's personas and their particular interests? Are you connecting your narratives to tangible, meaningful giving opportunities — while creating a sense of urgency for donors to give right now? 

Our client Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) — a Christian relief organization — does a great job using their website to connect their mission to their donors. Every holiday season, their site features a Christmas-oriented content and appeal strategy. By using Drupal’s Views functionality, MCC displays short snippets of impact along with calls to action. Donors are encouraged to provide goats, rabbits, bicycles, wells, educational opportunities, and other practical items for people in need around the world. 

Donors can easily scan the catalog-style array of available giving opportunities, select which item(s) they’d like to sponsor, add them to their cart, and complete the transaction quickly and easily. The entire experience is as simple and seamless as shopping on Amazon or any other large e-commerce website. 

Drupal’s most sophisticated e-commerce functionality often requires custom development, but the Drupal Commerce module meets many nonprofits' needs straight out of the box. You can accept donations, charge membership dues, and so much more.

Simply put, Drupal provides everything you need to make your website function as a springboard for digital-first philanthropy.

3. Level Up the UX of Online Giving

You’ve thoughtfully led donors through the decision funnel and connected them to the stories and giving options that will resonate most with their interests. The experience to this point has been positive and engaging. But what happens when it’s time for your donors to complete their journey and make their online gift? Will the experience continue to be enjoyable and friction-free?

With Drupal, you can create a seamless conversion experience in two primary ways:

• Integrate with your CRM and popular third-party payment platforms. If you already have a payment platform in place, great. It’s easy to integrate Drupal with payment gateways like Stripe, Authorize.net, and PayPal as well as with common CRMs like Salesforce and Blackbaud. No need to disrupt existing infrastructure. Simply configure Drupal to work with your current tools.
• Embed your donation form directly into your site. Some nonprofits notice that they lose donations if users are directed to a third-party payment platform. This extra step — especially if it feels clunky or out of place — can throw donors off. To overcome this challenge, consider embedding your donation form directly onto key landing pages and giving pages. This will allow donors to enter their information and complete the transaction without jumping to an unfamiliar domain.

Of course, the best way to make sure your UX is as good as it can be is to test it with your users. Find some supporters (volunteers are often quick to oblige) and ask them to complete a given transaction using each option listed above. They’ll be happy to tell you which parts of the experience delight them — and which leave them frustrated.

Let Drupal Bolster Your Fundraising Strategies All Year Long

The holidays tend to inspire a spirit of giving, making it the most wonderful time of the year for nonprofit fundraising. As donors open their hearts and wallets, it's critical to make the online giving process as simple and rewarding as possible. 

But the truth is your CMS needs to support your fundraising efforts in every season. To capture the attention of today’s savvy digital-first donors, you need your website to feature beautiful designs, compelling stories, and intuitive UX all year long.

So if you’re ready to learn more about what Drupal can do to support your nonprofit’s digital strategy, just reach out. We’d love to talk it through with you.