Tune in to Eoghan Beecher’s session from our 2025 Individual Giving Conference “Why Won’t You Let Me Donate?”
There are many reasons why someone would choose to donate to a charity of their choice, but there are also many reasons why they might not donate. In this session, we will explore areas that may prevent a supporter from completing an online donation. We will focus on a variety of areas, including creative journeys, user experience and technical implementation.
Our goal is to increase revenue from those who already want to give, but have his an entirely avoidable barrier.
Key learnings from this session:
- UX design
- Payment technology
- Cyber security
- Digital Marketing
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit follow and enable notifications so you’ll get notified to be first to hear of future podcast episodes. We’d love to see you back again!
And thank you to our friends at JustGiving who make the Fundraising Everywhere Podcast possible.
Transcript
Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast, your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear? Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraisingeverywhere.com/podcast to subscribe.
Jade Cunnah: Now, on to today’s episode. Enjoy.
Eoghan Beecher: Thank you so much, Nikki. Um, it, it, it’s always great to be at Fundraising Everywhere conferences because they’re so well organized and, and we’re all so well supported. But this one particularly, I’m delighted to see it, seven years. I didn’t know it was quite that long. But this one is, is one of my favorites just because individual giving is just so important and, and in a digital space where I live all the time, um, individual giving is, is vital because it is the most democratized form of fundraising.
Eoghan Beecher: It allows organizations to be independent, um, and it gives you the most opportunity to scale up and raise more money. And if you strip back all of the noise around what I like to do and get job satisfaction, I, I love line goes up. I love watching money come in so that wonderful organizations can do wonderful things with it.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, today I’m gonna talk about donors being frustrated and donors wanting to donate, um, but not being able to, and I wanna look at the, the reasons behind, um, behind that. I w- wanna very specifically talk about the parameters of this, though. We’re talking about supporters who are, at some level, engaging with you, at some point have a will to donate, but for whatever reason, haven’t donated.
Eoghan Beecher: We’re not talking about people who are never going to donate to your organization, who are ideologically opposed to you, who, you know, are completely opposed to everything you do. You know, we can quite happily ignore those people for now. We’re talking about enriching your experiences, enriching the ways of working a- and entraining a good way of thinking in terms of how we reach donors and how we give donors that experience that empowers them to make a donation in the most efficient way possible.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, in terms of the agenda today Our key focus is, is first of all to understand why people donate, to, to li- list through those reasons. Um, we wanna talk about what within that is fixable. So it is a, a, you know, this is critical action. This is trying to understand spaces that we as fundraisers can actually impact.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and then looking at the mechanisms that then allow us trigger higher levels of conversion, better supporter experiences, better conversions to regular giving and everything therein. Um, and I think most importantly, listing actions, like actual doing things. You know? Concepts are great, but, you know, pressing a button that fixes a problem is, is the most important thing we can do in our roles.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, the goal here as a group is that everybody could take at least one thing, maybe more, but ideally at least one thing that they can leave this fantastic conference when it’s finished today, go sit at their desk, implement it, and raise more money, and I think that’s a very simple goal. I think it’s something that has been consistent for the previous talks, particularly the previous talk we just watched.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, but I think this conference is excellent for setting those parameters of actionable insight that can help people raise more money. Um, before we start the meat and potatoes of this, I wanna talk about some things that are not happening and, and kind of myth bust a little bit. Um, when you lose a supporter in the middle of a journey, it’s not because they’ve changed their mind.
Eoghan Beecher: It’s not because they hate you. Um, in all likelihood, the reasons people don’t donate to you are most of the time entirely mundane. Um, it is very rare, obviously it does happen in extreme cases, but it is very rare that a supporter abandons a journey because they’ve done a complete 180 on their opinion and their passion and the things they care about.
Eoghan Beecher: Most of the people who have engaged with you and that are in your donation funnel are fairly consistently, you know, uh, happy to support your cause or the cause around you. Um- One of the things that’s really important to remember is that, you know, good experience can boost that journey, but also if they do happen to leave, you can speak to them again.
Eoghan Beecher: There are ways and means to continue to … continually to engage with people over a long period of time. Not everybody is ready to donate at any time, and that’s fine. So while we’re gonna talk today about increasing conversions, we’re not gonna talk about unrealistic goals. You shouldn’t have a conversion rate of 100% in any donation funnel.
Eoghan Beecher: If you do, then that is a sign you are not putting a diverse enough group of supporters and prospects into that funnel. If your conversion rate is too high, you are probably not reaching out to enough new donors who are earlier in their journey and aren’t immediately ready to donate. So that’s something that’s really important.
Eoghan Beecher: We should embrace the people that don’t make a donation immediately because they are a part of our ecosystem and they are the relationships we wish to build in lots of different ways. Um, I also wanna talk about lapsed donors, i.e., uh, this is something that, that I, I, I feel very strongly about. The … Again, the reason that regular donors lapse the majority of the time is not because they’ve done an ideological 180.
Eoghan Beecher: It’s normally because of completely innocent, normal, and mundane reasons. People might have financial pressures where they can’t give. Sometimes people just like to, to rotate charities. You’ve benefited for a couple of years. They give to another charity for a couple of years. They come back to you. One of the things that’s really important i-i- to remember is that the stats behind regular donations and, uh, you know, attrition and conversion rates are, are stats.
Eoghan Beecher: They’re representative. They’re not a rule that can be applied to an individual. So I’ve seen kind of charities talk about how they’ve got a lifetime value of three and a half years to every regular donor they acquire, and then view anybody that cancels within the first two years as, like, a problem donor, and that’s not representative of that person’s individual motivations.
Eoghan Beecher: Obviously, you want, on a macro level, to increase those KPIs. But in terms of an individual relationship with an individual donor, that’s not the same thing. And, and it’s important to recognize that the vast majority of people that stop giving to you regularly probably still like the work you do and are probably very proud of the fact that they’ve supported your work.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, negative reasons are, are, are much rarer than people like to think. It’s totally normal to kind of assume the worst when you think about problems that you’re trying to overcome. But one of the most important ways of thinking for this type of exercise is actually to be as accurate as possible, and sometimes that means assuming the best because it gives us the most power to get people start giving again.
Eoghan Beecher: And people do restart donations all the time. Um, and that’s something that’s really important. Now, why don’t people donate? So I’m gonna talk through four reasons. Um, and these are gonna be broadly quite mundane. Um, they’re not gonna be massive kind of ideological questions about the creative root, the nature of giving, the, the causes and people’s relationship to them.
Eoghan Beecher: They’re gonna talk about very, very simple things that just act as points of friction that don’t allow people to give. Um, first of all, you, you won’t accept their money. Um, I have a, a kind of a loose analogy that, that, that I’ve put together for this where, you know, I, I’ve been to my local coffee shop and I’ve bought a coffee and a, and a pain au chocolat, um, and I’ve paid by card.
Eoghan Beecher: And I’ve gone home, and I’ve said to my wife, “The coffee was really, really good. We should go back and get a proper breakfast there tomorrow,” because talking about what breakfast we’re gonna have is a, a very frequent topic of conversation in my household. Um, imagine if we went back the next day and went up to pay with card and the guy behind the counter said, “No, cash only.”
Eoghan Beecher: That would be ludicrous. You wouldn’t tolerate it. And that’s something that’s really, really, really important in fundraising, that we allow people to make donations in the way they wish to make donations. Payment methods are incredibly important because supporters have circumstances, they have convenience, they have barriers that we have to be putting ourselves in a place to facilitate.
Eoghan Beecher: I have used a, a screenshot of a donation flow with an Apple Pay button on it here, um, uh, uh, because that is the biggest growth payment method. But there are lots and lots of payment methods that people like to use. Um, the kind of scenario we’re talking about, you know, credit cards, direct debits. If we are talking about donors on the move in public places, accessing your donation pages and your donation funnels on their mobile, which is a very, very popular way of accessing things, then it is not necessarily convenient if you’re sitting in a cafe in public to pull out a credit card and sta-start typing in your numbers.
Eoghan Beecher: What is very convenient is to click a button, scan your face, and have your payment go through very easily. And I think it’s really important for people to recognize that the, the, the, the full suite of payment gateways is fundamental for managing conversion rates in the best way possible. In the UK and Ireland, you should be looking at all credit cards, and that includes American Express.
Eoghan Beecher: I know it’s a little bit more expensive, but it is worth it. You will have drop-off and less money if you don’t offer it. If that is the only card somebody has available, the options of them either paying with that or not paying at all, you will take that tiny percentage fee. Um, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal are all incredibly popular.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, Apple Pay is, is ramping up extremely significantly. From twenty-twenty-three to twenty-twenty-four, we saw four hundred and fifty percent increase. Um, and I have just literally this morning pulled a report for a customer, and on their mobile pages, Apple Pay made over sixty percent of all donations on their mobile environments.
Eoghan Beecher: So it is absolutely huge at the moment, and, and it is so important for giving support as a good experience. Somebody comes in and says, “This is my preferred payment type.” it is prudent to say, “Okay, yes, you can pay with that.” A refusal means a potential lost donor, means potential frustration in the donor, and it means potential less revenue for you.
Eoghan Beecher: If they offer you a payment again, you also need to take it. And, and the story I, I talk about the coffee shop saying cash only the second time, that, that, you know, that’s ludicrous. That would never happen. You would never have that experience in, you know, a shop that you go to, in a service you engage with, in, in a, in a website where you purchase things from.
Eoghan Beecher: You would never expect that experience. But I guarantee you that if you go and pick ran- 10 random charities right now, um, and Google them and go to their websites, I guarantee you will see regular giving restricted to direct debit only and you won’t be accepting credit cards or Apple Pay or Google Pay or PayPal in a regular environment.
Eoghan Beecher: And I, I just think that’s a huge misstep. I think if somebody has chosen, of all the payment types they’ve chosen, if they’ve chosen on their first gift to you to pay by one specific payment type, then that is a piece of data, that’s a piece of information that the supporter has shared with you. They’ve said, “Hi, my name is Owen.
Eoghan Beecher: My favorite payment method is Google Pay. That’s how I want to give you money.” It’s extremely common, um, in terms of managing supporter journeys to have follow-up comms where you say, “Thank you for the one-off donation. Can you make it a regular donation?” And the supporter says, “Yes, I’d love to make that a regular donation,” and then you don’t let them pay with the same method they previously paid with.
Eoghan Beecher: It’s a huge, huge issue in this sector. Direct debit’s great. It has loads and loads of benefits, but it shouldn’t be the only show in town. If a supporter has consistent behavior of using one type of, of, of method to give, then it’s only prudent to continually allow them to, to, to give by that method when they choose to engage with you on a stronger level.
Eoghan Beecher: Regular giving, repeat giving has to be reflective of the first method of payment. Um- E-wallets and, and, and, and card payments are becoming increasingly popular. One of the things that’s really important within this sector is to understand what supporters are doing in their day-to-day life. You, you know, y- your competition is Deliveroo, it’s Uber, it’s all of these other things that people spend their disposable income on.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and if those, you know, if those platforms are going in a certain direction, then it’s prudent to follow that. You can have, you know, on delivery apps, you can have subscription services to avoid paying delivery charges and stuff like that. Um, and they are all exclusively with either Apple Pay, Google Pay or, or credit cards.
Eoghan Beecher: They’re not using direct debit. So people who are potential new donation audiences for you, new people, are not used to using the payment methods you’re nec- you’re, you’re potentially asking them for. So the very important thing is to understand how we can meet the market where it wants to be met, um, and how we can maximize opportunity.
Eoghan Beecher: The risks associated, and there, there was a kind of a, a, a big talk about the risk associated with moving into things like card payments because they have expiry dates. Um- you know, this is a significantly lower risk than it used to be. Expiry dates are getting longer, repeat payment trust is getting higher.
Eoghan Beecher: So, you know, a lot of card providers don’t actually adhere to expiry dates. A lot of the kind of blockers within this space, the, the reason we’ve kind of chosen Direct Debit as our golden cow and never moved away from it, is because people had risks that simply don’t actually exist anymore. And the rewards are becoming so much higher because you have such a large audience willing to engage in this way.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and I think that’s really, really, um, important. It allows you to give a better experience to supporters and it also allows you to, you know, give better clarity in things like failure messaging, you know, and stuff like win-back campaigns. If you understand what somebody’s preferred point of action is, then you’ll be able to ask them to come back and become a donor again.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and we talked about earlier how, how that does happen, how that is important. So I would say first and foremost, that payment suite has to include the things that people want to use. It’s entirely, you know, it, it’s entirely semantic to do so. Um, there’s also a concept of users not having time. Um, if anybody’s ever worked in face-to-face, that was my first foray into the sector some 20 years ago.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, you will always be told by a team leader, “You shouldn’t accept that somebody has- doesn’t have time.” But in a lot of fundraising environments, you don’t actually have the opportunity to, to manage that. So your goal is to preempt the friction people feel, the rush people that are in and make sure you give them an experience that allows them to donate as easily as possible.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, you know, when somebody enters your digital environment, first things first, they wanna know if this is gonna take them all day. You wanna be able to give them a very clear, low-friction, easy way to give. You wanna make processes very transparent for them, and you also wanna be able to offer somebody a very quick donate option.
Eoghan Beecher: That’s really, really important. Um, I’ve, I’ve chosen to illustrate this with six steps. Um, sometimes you see outrageous levels of steps on c- on online conversion pages and, and it baffles me w- why somebody would ever communicate that because you’re in a scenario where, you know, y- you want to reassure a donor that actually this won’t, won’t take a long time.
Eoghan Beecher: This is easy. You wanna donate to us, we’re gonna make it very easy for you to donate to us. Telling them that they’re going to have to go through unnecessary hoops to make that donation is a guaranteed way for them to say, “I will come back later.” And remember, mentioned earlier, people aren’t leaving because they’ve changed their mind on your cause.
Eoghan Beecher: They’re leaving because it’s, you know, on a mundane level, a little bit inconvenient and they think, with the best of intention, they’ll come back later. The sad thing is there’s a non-zero chance that some of those people will just simply and innocently forget to come back later. So by having a friction-full donate page, you are risking losing donors you don’t necessarily need to lose.
Eoghan Beecher: Somebody is in your environment ready to give, you’ve made it a little bit difficult for them, they’ve abandoned, and then they haven’t come back. A- and that’s something that we need to attack very, very aggressively. We need to make sure that we’re being very honest about how we’ve constructed our donation pages, how we’ve constructed our funnels, and how we’re happy to remove elements that we feel are not going to facilitate good donation and making supporters happier.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, there is as well an acceptance that some people will leave no matter what. You’re not gonna convert everybody, of course. Um, in that scenario, it’s really important to understand retargeting opportunities. If you have a robust digital landscape, um, you know, uh, via various ad buying platforms, you should be able to retarget people who’ve previously visited your site, um, with, you know, both social media ads and display advertising In that scenario, that is one of your best audiences.
Eoghan Beecher: If somebody has, you know, if your peak time of year is December, if that’s the time you make all your money, then anybody who’s visited your site but hasn’t managed to donate between September, October and November absolutely should be the first type of people you are sending fundraising messaging to.
Eoghan Beecher: That’s so important. So when the friction, you know, friction or no friction doesn’t result in an immediate donation, somebody’s abandoned, they still like you, they’re still seventy, eighty percent of the way to making a donation, you have an opportunity. It’s important, to be honest as well, to make sure that you view your donation pages as a supporter as well.
Eoghan Beecher: So sometimes step away from your desk, open something on a personal device and try and ask, “Is this annoying? Is there any point of friction?” And that can be really fruitful. There’s three key things that I would say a donor asks when they’re making a donation. The first one is, “Am I in the right place?”
Eoghan Beecher: That is a yes/no binary of whether I should continue in making my donation or not. If you have very clear and impactful branding, you’re immediately satisfying that question and removing any ambiguity from the donation g- and putting a much higher chance of completion within there. Really, really straightforward.
Eoghan Beecher: You also wanna say, “Where do I start?” So this is super important as well. When somebody gets into a, a- an online donation space or a web shop or even in, in your real life, if you go outside the house and walk into a shop or a cafe or a pub or anything like that, you will immediately look for instructions about how to engage with that product.
Eoghan Beecher: If you go into a restaurant, you’ll see a sign saying, “Please wait to be seated.” You will wait there. You will be seated. The system works. If they don’t have that sign, you will amble around aimlessly looking for somebody to, to help you along the way, and you may not have the best experience. In this scenario, we want to make it very clear for donors above the fold what they need to do to get started.
Eoghan Beecher: And above the fold is really important. You would be surprised how many digital products don’t necessarily take above the fold into account and, you know, from my experience, significant amounts of people don’t scroll down. If they can’t see immediately what they should be doing, they abandon the site, and they don’t make a donation.
Eoghan Beecher: So right here we’ve illustrated that with a very easy, non-committal choice of do you wanna give monthly? Do you wanna give one-off? What that does is creates a starting point for user behavior and from a donor psychology perspective, people like to finish things they’ve started. So once you get somebody into the habit of clicking and making selections, you will continually increase their likelihood of wanting to complete that donation.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and that’s really, really important for making sure that you have robust conversion rates and revenue And then lastly, when somebody does something wrong. So what have I done wrong is, is so important. If you get to the end of a journey and it says, oh, you, you know, you’ve gone through this whole thing, there’s an error, you’ve done something wrong, you have to go back and find what you’ve done wrong.
Eoghan Beecher: It’s annoying. You might just go, do you know what? Not bothered, gonna leave, come back later, but probably won’t. Um, what I’ve illustrated here is, is live and immediate high-contrast error messaging. Um, and what that means is you can get people to correct mandatory errors very, very quickly while they’re completing a donation form, which means there’s less chance of points of friction that cause abandons.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, uh, uh, you know, typing in your email incorrectly there and immediately getting a notification saying, “Please type it in correctly,” will have a very high chance of, you know, continuing a stable donation journey. If you go all the way down to the end, fill out your credit card, do absolutely everything, then press donate, then get a failure message that’s saying go back and fix your email, there’s a much higher chance that out of frustration you’ll go, “Ugh, no, I’m gone.”
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and that’s something that’s really important. So I would say, again, step outside of your desk, open up on, on one of your own devices and check what happens when you make a mistake. As fundraisers, it’s an instinct that we get so used to our forms and our products that we actually fill them out a lot of the time without ever making mistakes, and we just forget to check what happens when mistakes happen, and that’s something that’s, that’s super important and something that everybody can do immediately.
Eoghan Beecher: Um- Then you’ve got a question of, of, you know, failing to ask people for money. Um, and, you know, uh, uh, this is actually great because it was, it was discussed specifically in the last session as well with regard to email. Um, you know, making sure you ask in places where, where it makes sense is really important because, you know, people want to give.
Eoghan Beecher: They, they want to be asked to give. Sometimes it’s that kind of the direct ask is the thing that takes them over the line into becoming a supporter and really being passioned, impassioned and, and empowered to be an advocate for your organization. And there’s a few areas that I think probably don’t see as many asks as they should, um, and they are opportunities where supporters actually feel natural to be asked.
Eoghan Beecher: So emails, of course, in the last session that was very strong. Um, you know, when somebody Googles you, they, they wanna be asked for money as well. Um, social media and, and obviously when somebody’s feeling generous, and that’s a, that’s a case for seasonality. Um, it is really important that, that everybody has a budget or a work stream or a part of their week dedicated to ensuring that you are asking for money in all of these areas wherever you can.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, a- a- and, you know, explore a little bit why. So emails, as we saw in the last session, it’s an entirely natural space to be asked. It is the part of your supporter relationship where you’re probably having the most opportunity to communicate, to tell people the power and the value of their donation, and it’s got a load of opportunity to personalization so you, you can really connect with somebody in a really good way.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, you know, from focus groups we’ve done, people have identified that they, they feel it’s weird not to be asked for money in an email. They think, “You know, you’ve sent me this great piece of content. What do you want? What, you know, I’m dying to do something to support you.” And that’s where we’re, you know, that’s where we’re looking at.
Eoghan Beecher: This kind of ability to ask in the right place is, is, is vital. Search is, is also incredibly important Um, I’m going to be extremely blunt here and say SEO and organic search is not enough. Um, if you open up, um, Google on your browser right now and type in your charity’s name, you’re gonna see y- yourselves coming up first.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, that’s because it’s contextualized and personalized. There are people who will Google you, and maybe they might spell something slightly wrong, or they might have something off. They might not be a regular user in the charity space, and they won’t get the same search results. Um, and they won’t be signposted as well for you.
Eoghan Beecher: You cannot go out with a strategy of relying on, on paid, on a- on organic search. It is good, it is important, but you have to have paid search to successfully fundraise. And there are, you know, through no fault of other charities, there are charities that will hijack your journey because they, they, you know, they bid on a broad match.
Eoghan Beecher: So, you know, if somebody is bidding on the keyword donate, somebody types in donate to your charity’s name, then it’s likely that if you’re not part of that paid search section, then another charity will be displaying before you. It’s not their fault. They can’t be expected to put in negative keywords for every single charity brand in the world, but you will be losing out if you are not investing in paid search.
Eoghan Beecher: And paid search is cheap. It is the biggest ROI you will see in any form of fundraising, any form of planned fundraising you do. Obviously, you know, occasionally you have things that go viral, stuff like that. But in terms of things that you can plan and control and leverable, you will not see better ROI on a- anything else, and it is fundamentally important.
Eoghan Beecher: If you don’t do it, if you do split tests of using search versus not using search, you will see a significant decline or increase in revenue because ultimately it is the key signpost for the most popular form of traffic management in the entire world is, is paid search. And there is no reason not to be investing it as best as possible because it will pay, and any board will immediately sign off on an ROI that paid search will produce Um, also looking at social media.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, social media is the place, you know, you, you’re reaching people where they like to hang out. You’re not asking them to do something that’s not natural. You’re saying, “Look, this is the place you feel safe. This is the place you like to have deep conversations. This is the place where you like to engage with your friends.
Eoghan Beecher: We’re here. You can donate to us here.” And what you’re doing there is boosting trust. By, by being in the right place and being connected to supporters, you’re boosting the ability to secure lasting relationships because they care. Social media also has a lot of data, a lot of data. Um, we tell social media platforms more than we tell our doctor.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, it is really, really important for us as charities to learn how to leverage that data to build up ways of reaching new donors, new audiences. Meta, um, is still a license to print money. It has been phenomenal in the past, um, because the, the way they, they stack data is really important and the way their tracking and attribution works is incredibly important.
Eoghan Beecher: If you’re using conversion API, you can still maintain high-quality tracking. You can absolutely rinse Meta for fantastic amounts of donations, and it’s also a, a really good chance to find new people that you’ve never been able to reach before, and that’s super important. Um, and then lastly, just the, the seasonality.
Eoghan Beecher: When somebody’s feeling generous, um, you can predict seasonality. You can look at your previous donor data and see when spikes happen. You can assign reasons to that. It may be a, you know, a religious festival, it may be a time of year, it may be something like that. But ultimately, seasonality is something that you don’t control but you can, y-you can ride the wave of.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, I, I remember years ago I worked in, in a housing and homelessness organization and we used to try and plan when it was like raining or, or snowing or, or particularly cold. We knew that people would be more likely to give, so we wanted to make sure our ad’s out. And, and you know, I remember kind of talking about seasonality and somebody saying, “Look, you don’t control the weather.”
Eoghan Beecher: And I said, “Yeah, I don’t control the weather, but I control the ads that go out when the weather gets colder,” and that’s really, really important. The return on ad spend you see if you can leverage seasonality is, is amazing and that’s where asks need to go. And the last thing I wanna talk about in the last few minutes, um, is just the simple concept of, of computer says no.
Eoghan Beecher: So sometimes you can get your ask in the right place, you can create a frictionless user journey, you can offer somebody all of the payment gateways they want, and you can have somebody that comes in, completes your form, has loads of time to do it, engages really well with it. They get all the way through, they press the donate button, and the payment fails.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and that is one of the most incredibly frustrating things. Occasionally, y-you will find people kind of taking a, “Ah, well, there’s nothing we can do” attitude to that. And payments do occasionally fail. You know, sometimes if somebody has insufficient funds in their account, of course the payment’s gonna fail.
Eoghan Beecher: But sometimes there are issues with technical configuration that cause payments to fail when they otherwise shouldn’t So ultimately, charity donations are considered quite high risk, um, from a fraud perspective. So payment, um, service providers will sometimes apply quite strenuous kind of checks to make sure that the payment’s, uh, uh, the payment’s gonna go through properly.
Eoghan Beecher: Um, and sometimes because of those kind of high bar of, of trust that’s needed to secure a payment, very small technical configurations are susceptible to errors and, and typos that can trigger completely unnecessary payment failures. Um, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen recently a, a configuration where a postcode was being passed through in some metadata to a payment provider and it wasn’t needed, but the postcode being incorrect without a space in it was causing payments to have like a 15%, you know, 15% risk score attr- at- attracted to them, which then meant a, a ton of payments were failing.
Eoghan Beecher: And it was completely unnecessary. It was a quick fix to remove that from the metadata and not send it through. All of a sudden, that trust score is not being triggered and all of the payments are going through. It’s really, really boring, but it’s really impactful in terms of providing an excellent experience where you can boost relationships.
Eoghan Beecher: Things like 3D Secure are really important. They’re good for charities. They’re also good for supporters. They provide security, transparency, anti-fraud measures. And to drag back to things like e-wallets, if you look at Apple Pay and Google Pay, their 3D Secure mechanism is going to be biometric. It’s gonna be through thumbprint, or it’s gonna be through face ID or one of these ones, which means you are providing an extra layer of reassurance.
Eoghan Beecher: So not only are you letting somebody pay with the method they want to pay with, which is the first thing we were talking about, you’re also providing a technically more consistent solution, which allows a higher rate of acceptance. Um, w- we would normally go out and say that, you know, with, with a good improved, uh, technical stack for payments, you should see kind of 4, 5, 6% acceptance.
Eoghan Beecher: But we’ve seen dramatic increases in acceptance, or rather in some configurations we’ve seen completely unnecessary failure rates that just haven’t been acceptable. And, and fixing those has driven enormous amounts of revenue into, into new funnels, which is just so, so important. So what I would say is right now With your technical setup, everybody should be regularly asking what their payment failure rate is.
Eoghan Beecher: They should be asking to identify the reason for, for payment failures, ’cause this can tell you, you know, you know, if you’re getting a lot of insufficient funds failures, probably fundraising in a, in an area of low-value donors. You could move that into different areas. If failed users are going on to make successful gifts later, that’s, that’s good.
Eoghan Beecher: Or if you’re losing them, then you know that it’s lost revenue. You also wanna be able to monitor changes in failure rate. Has an external factor come in and changed things? And then, you know, ultimately, every organization should have a clear plan on what, what they’re doing to fix this. If there is a, a reason that people are not able to donate, that should be a work stream and there should be people seeking solutions to let those people give.
Eoghan Beecher: People want to give. They love giving to you, and if you don’t let them give, then, then, then not only are you losing their money right now, but you’re losing a potential long-term relationships. In terms of what we can do to raise more money, go check the journeys. Look at friction. Check on all devices.
Eoghan Beecher: Just ’cause it works on your iPhone doesn’t mean it works on your mate’s Android device. Um, look at those failure rates and ask why. Maintain all of the payment methods, all of them, even the ones that you think cost a little bit more or are a little bit more cumbersome. Um, and just go out and ask more people.
Eoghan Beecher: The, the digital tools that are available allow you to, to, to make better asks of your supporter base. Your supporter base love you. They want to give to you. They really care about supporting the work that you do. You should let them
Jade Cunnah: Thank you for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend? And if you’d like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps fundraisers like you find us.
Jade Cunnah: Thank you so much. See you next time. Bye