If you were a marketer selling widgets online, part of your job would be to steer potential customers to easy-to-find order buttons that lead to an order form. Each button clicked by a visitor would be a measurable conversion.
Congrats! You did your job leading visitors to the web page where they can buy what they came for. Marketers get paid handsomely to create these highly converting flowthrough pages. Of course, in planned giving, we are not selling widgets, and we are not asking for prospects to buy anything. But that does not mean we can’t learn from this process of converting site visitors.
Just as in the for-profit world, your planned giving website should be a place that builds creditability for your brand/mission, and makes a visitor feel safe considering a financial transaction. While your goal may just be awareness building or educating prospects on the viability of a planned gift, each visit should aim for a conversion. And that conversion is a phone call or email to the planned giving desk that will give the donor more information, and through which, you can begin building a relationship with a donor.
To be successful, your planned giving website must steer potential donors to your phone number and contact information, just like for-profit marketing leads buyers to an easy-to-find order button.
So I ask you… is your phone number easy to find? Or is it hidden on the bottom of a long scroll?
What about your Contact Us page or email address?
The simplest way to increase your planned giving conversions is to make your phone number extremely visible. I like to see it on all of the pages of your planned giving website and above the fold.
Don’t hide it. It’s your conduit to a gift.
It’s your planned giving order button.
Planned giving phone, email, and other contact information should be the easiest thing to find on a planned giving website. Don’t make potential donors search for something that should be upfront and prominent.
And if you think this is the most obvious tip you have read in a while... I agree. But I wouldn’t be mentioning it if it wasn’t the first thing I point out almost daily while doing evaluations of planned giving websites. But sometimes an answer is so obvious we can't see it because we are just looking too hard. When in fact, it’s right in front of our faces.
Often, it’s the simplest things that makes all the difference.
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