Stop Being Stupid: Week 6 of 40
Someone decided to donate to you this week.
They found you. They read enough to care. They pulled out their phone. They clicked the button.
And nothing worked.
Maybe the page didn’t load. Maybe the form was unusable on a screen that wasn’t a laptop. Maybe they had to create an account before they could give £10, and that was the moment they closed the tab. You don’t know which one it was. You weren’t watching. You probably haven’t tested your donation process since whoever set it up showed you how it worked.
That is this week’s stupidity. It is not glamorous. It is not complicated. But it costs a lot of money.
The abandoned donation is permanent
People do not try again. There is no second attempt, no follow-up that catches them in the same mood. They close the window and the impulse is gone. You didn’t persuade them wrong. You didn’t lose them at the pitch. You lost them at the door, which is a different kind of failure entirely.
In the UK, there is an additional layer to this. Every failed donation is not just the face value you lost. It is the Gift Aid too. Gift Aid is not compulsory. Nothing is stopping you from leaving it unclaimed, and plenty of organisations do exactly that. But the government will hand you 25p for every pound your donors give you, at no cost to them, just for having the right declaration on your form and a process to claim it. UK charities received £1.7 billion in Gift Aid last year. The ones that were not set up received none of it. If your donation process does not include a clean Gift Aid declaration, you are funding HMRC instead of your work.
A broken donation page also does something subtler. It signals that you are not paying attention. If you cannot manage your website, the reasoning goes, can you manage my money? It is not fair. But it is what people think, and you will not get the chance to argue with it. It is the digital equivalent of accepting a cash donation in a soggy shoe box.
What to actually do
Test the full journey. Not just the link. The whole thing, from the donate button on your homepage to the confirmation email in the inbox. Do it on a phone. An older one if you can, not the one you bought last year. Over half of all web traffic is on mobile. If your form requires pinching and zooming, you are imposing a tax on generosity.
Make sure the Gift Aid declaration is there, prominent, and worded correctly. If you are not set up to claim it, or your platform does not handle it, that is worth fixing. Not because you have to, but because the money is real and HMRC will not chase you to collect it.
Use a platform your donors will recognise. JustGiving, Enthuse, CAF Donate, Charity Checkout. An unfamiliar payment page triggers doubt at the exact moment you need trust.
Put the full donation journey test in one person’s diary, once a month. Homepage button, payment form, confirmation email, on a phone and on a desktop. It takes ten minutes. A broken link sitting unnoticed for six weeks is not bad luck.
You have spent hours on grant applications this month. Probably more than you want to count. The funder may or may not say yes.
The donor who wanted to give you money was already saying yes. Don’t make them stop.
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