Mobile-optimized or mobile-ready, don’t lose nonprofit fundraising donors by choosing the wrong one

If you haven’t noticed yet a technology stampede is taking place and it looks set to continue. Nonprofits both large and small are urgently looking to convert their websites to be user-friendly on mobile devices if they haven’t done do already, in fact many have and yet may still be missing the benefits because there are two approaches to making these changes.

Technology updates these days are rarely slow in taking place and the migration of the online audience from desktops/laptops to phones and tablets has been the most accelerated of all. It was only about five years ago that having a phone that did little more than take photos and allow you email access was the norm. Over the last four years smartphone ownership has more than doubled plus tablets are now more affordable than ever, all of this means that much of your audience is now viewing websites differently. Today in the US & Canada about 30% of all website visits are via mobile devices/tablets compared with about 12% at the beginning of 2012. The adoption rate for mobile web browsing far exceeds the early growth for radio, television, telephones, cable TV or internet access – in short there’s never been a change quite as rapid. So how is the fundraising sector responding to these changes?

The answer is a mixed one; many nonprofits converted their website to full mobile readiness during the early stages of this growth, others took the half-way approach of becoming mobile-friendly as opposed to mobile-optimized which is hardly worth doing. However the ratio of sites that are not mobile ready is still alarmingly high – and that can cost you potential donors. (Incidentally our corporate site is mobile-optimized whereas we’ll be converting our blog shortly if you wanted to compare the difference between the two on a smartphone).

Mobile-friendly is a developer’s term where a site has a few tweaks to avoid the need for some scrolling, however the text size, images and key contact pages are almost useless due to the small size on a mobile device, making the exercise rather futile. What’s really required sooner rather than later is to optimize your site for mobile devices. For example take a look at the two images below of donation pages from a pair of nonprofit sites I found:

Which website would you be more likely to finish your donation with?

Remember, this is probably the first time that the potential donor has seen the ‘donate’ page on your website. Which one are they most likely to engage with? Which one would you engage with?

The site on the left is mobile-optimized whereas the site on the right is mobile-friendly, you don’t have to scroll around your screen to view the page but without the aid of a magnifying glass you can’t clearly read very much.

So imagine you are that donor ready to make a donation. Is it fair to say that how easy a website is to use might make the difference between donating or just moving on with your day? Reports state that you can lose a large amount of donations (perhaps as high as 50%) if online giving via a phone proves too difficult. While both examples above ‘work’ it’s obvious which one a potential donor is likely to follow through with. Many web-hosting companies offer a service to make a site ‘mobile-friendly’ which typically reduces all content by the required percentage to be viewed on a mobile screen, but such a reduction makes the content illegible in many cases. Make sure you research the results before making that change with your hosting company.

Ultimately you’ll be best served not making a change to ‘mobile-friendly’ until you are in a position to make your site fully optimized, having to scroll through content on a phone is preferable to not being able to view it at all.

This could make the difference between receiving a new donation or just leaving your donor annoyed with the site, perhaps forever. Don’t take the chance of losing a donor over this mobile readiness issue on your website.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery services, donation caging, donation processing and other donor management services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all contact centre services