Study Reveals Potential Donors Can't Find Info on Websites They Want

Robert Weiner of TechSoup made the following post, Jakob Nielsen Thinks Your Web Site Sucks, that many nonprofit EDs will find helpful:

Well, maybe it doesn't exactly suck, but potential donors can't figure it out. In a recent study of nonprofit Web sites, usability guru Jakob Nielsen asked participants "what information they want to see on nonprofit Web sites before they decide whether to donate?" The most heavily requested information was:

• The organization's mission, goals, objectives, and work.
• How it uses donations and contributions.

He found that only 43% of the sites he reviewed answered the first question on their homepages, and only 4% answered the second question. He did find that most organizations answered these questions somewhere within their sites, but said users often had problems finding this information.


He also looked at the "turn-off factors" that caused charities to lose out on donations and found that:

• 47% had usability problems relating to page and site design, including unintuitive information architecture, cluttered pages, and confusing workflow.
• On 17% of the sites, users couldn't find where to make a donation.
• 53% had content issues related to writing for the Web, including unclear or missing information and confusing terms.

The good news is that "once people had decided to make a donation and found the donation button it was fairly easy for them to proceed through the workflow and donate."

I think Nielsen is making a big assumption: that potential donors visit a nonprofits' Web site without knowing what the nonprofit does, and then look for this information before donating. But his point about the difficulty of finding the donation button on some sites is a well taken point.

You can read the whole study here.