3 ways to make donating easier in CiviCRM

Here are three ways you can make your CiviCRM donation and sign-up forms as easy as possible to complete:

1. Disable confirmation pages

By default, CiviCRM configures your contribution pages to use a confirmation page. This means your donor will fill out the form, click Submit, and then get a second page that essentially says, "Please review your information and click Submit again" — and if they don't submit that confirmation, there's no donation.

Why would you want that?

Unless you can articulate a clear reason to make the donor think twice before giving, just turn that off.

You can find it under the “Title” tab of the contribution page configuration:

(CiviCRM won’t let you disable this for paid event registrations, but there’s an unlisted extension that purports to allow it: Skip Event Confirm Page)

2. Disable Stripe billing address fields

If you're using the Stripe payment processor, it will, by default, add a full set of billing address fields to the contribution form.

That's eight additional fields on your form, most of them required.

That potentially doubles the effort of completing the form. And the thing is, Stripe does not need this information to process the payment.

Fortunately, you can turn that off. It's a checkbox under the Stripe Settings (Administer > CiviContribute > Stripe Settings):

3. Move all optional information requests to the thank-you page.

Newsletter sign up options, questions about their interests or their demographics — all of that is nice to have.

But are you willing to demand that they think about that before they donate?

Instead, you can create a separate Profile for those questions, and add a link to that form in the contribution thank-you page.

Let them donate first. Then ask them for more information if you wish.

Here's the thing:

When a site visitor donates, something happens that's more important than the donation itself: they give you their name and their email address and express interest in your work.

That's the beginning of your relationship with them.

In the long run, your best bet is to make it as easy as possible for them to begin that relationship, by making your donation forms as short and simple as possible.

After all, if they give up on your contribution page, you'll never even know that they exist. And where’s your relationship then?

All the best,
A.