The pre-checked box that grew fee coverage 50%, with no lost donors

Paul Kramer: Your donors have been trained by the private sector, not by you, but by everyone else around them. Every other company they buy from has spent years and years teaching them that paying should really take one tap. There shouldn't be a lot of friction in that process. So that's also what they expect when they land on your page, whether they realize it directly or not.

Think about the person giving you $50 at 11 o'clock on December 31st. A few hours earlier, they probably ordered dinner on DoorDash, double-clicked that button on their phone, and paid with Apple Pay. And we're asking them to go find their wallet and type out a card number more often than not. Most of them will probably do it because they care about you, but a lot of them also won't.

Ann Fellman: Bloomerang presents Fuel Impact, the podcast that powers your next fundraising breakthrough. This is where we have real conversations with fundraising leaders, technology innovators, and fundraising experts.

Ann Fellman: In this episode of Fuel Impact, I spoke with Paul Kramer, who leads the nonprofit vertical at Stripe, and Evan DaSilva, VP of Payments at Bloomerang. We talked about online donation forms. We covered everything from how do you remove the friction out of your donation form? What is one thing you should fix on the form before December 31st? The thumb test, and why digital wallets are an absolute must. So if you work with nonprofits or fundraising teams, this episode matters because your donation forms are worth a second look.

Ann Fellman: Here's my conversation with Paul Kramer and Evan DaSilva.

Ann Fellman: Hey everybody, welcome to Fuel Impact, where I sit down with the people helping nonprofits push their fundraising impact higher. If you've ever built a donation form, hit publish, and then never looked at it again, you're actually in really good company.

Today we're gonna get into what actually happens on that page, what's working, what's potentially worth a second look, and we've got two people who study this for a living for every nonprofit. There are things you are gonna need to know before year end.

So I've got Evan DaSilva, VP of Payments here at Bloomerang, and Paul Kramer, who leads the nonprofit vertical at Stripe. Welcome both of you.

Paul Kramer: Thanks, Ann. Really glad to be here.

Ann Fellman: We're gonna jump right in because I think we've got a lot of ground to cover. So Evan, I wanna start with you. Bloomerang has been running a research effort called Fundraising Innovation. And for anybody who hasn't heard of it, what is it in just like the everyday language?

Evan DaSilva: Yeah, you know, it just kind of spun out of this idea of we kept hearing customers asking us what setting should I have on? What's the highest, you know, performing features that you have on your fundraising page?

Over and over again, we're hearing it. And I think, you know, for me, one of the big anecdotes is we always have a customer come to our all hands meeting every month. And we always put up a QR code to go donate to their page. And I would say it's about a 50-50 hit rate for when we open up that page and we look at it and we say, ooh, okay, there's some work that they could do here that could significantly improve their fundraising. And we need to be doing more to help folks out and letting them know, it's just too much work to be thinking constantly and doing your own test.

And figuring out, should I change this button? Bloomerang released this new feature. What can we do from an innovation standpoint just to help guide people towards the best practices for their online donation forms? Everything moves pretty quickly, and helping them stay up to speed without having to feel like they need to be revisiting their form every single month.

Ann Fellman: So Paul, flipping to you, you look at Stripe, you're looking at payment behavior across all kinds of organizations, not just nonprofits. What are you seeing right now? And has anything shifted recently that nonprofit teams really should know about?

Paul Kramer: Yeah, absolutely. I really like my job because it gives me a weird, strange view of the world. On any given day, you know, I set up some dashboards. I'm looking at how people pay for coffee, for a software company, and then also at a food bank. And what's kind of stuck with me really early on is how little changes from one to the next. It's the same person, the same phone, the same credit card, the same habits, the same amount of patience, the latter being really, really important.

And here's really what I think nonprofit teams should know, right? Your donors have been trained by the private sector, not by you, but by everyone else around them. Every other company they buy from has spent years and years teaching them that, you know, paying should really take one tap. There shouldn't be a lot of friction in that process. So that's also what they expect when they land on your page, whether they realize it directly or not.

Think about the person giving you, you know, $50 at 11 o'clock on December 31st. A few hours earlier, they probably ordered dinner on DoorDash, double-clicked that button on their phone, and paid with Apple Pay. And you know, we're asking them to go find their wallet and type out a card number more often than not. Most of them will probably do it because they care about you, but a lot of them also won't. And those are kind of the ones that I — and I'm sure you — spend a lot of your time thinking about. We see this constantly.

Where someone removes one field or turns on one wallet and then changes it fast enough that their first reaction is usually, you know, double check the reporting. So none of this is kind of about asking donors to behave differently because it's a good cause, but it's the opposite. It's about us having to meet them where they are. A donor is giving you something.

And the least we can do is to make that process of giving as easy as possible, as frictionless as possible.

Ann Fellman: I love that. You really hit on something that I think in the technology sector we've talked about for a long time, which is the consumerization of technology and the expectations that through our just our everyday living that we have that we place on every interaction. So that's a really good call out.

So kind of thinking about those donation forms and like, you know, getting it working. A lot of nonprofits build the donation form, right? They publish it, it's live now. The reality is is they're gonna move on to fifty other things on their plate, which you know, obviously that's just the way it is in the nonprofit sector. So Evan, given that, like what have you learned in the research? What have you learned about what happens to a form that's been sitting untouched for a while?

Evan DaSilva: Yeah, I think a donation form, like many things, if it's sitting untouched, if it's unused, it's atrophy, right? If you're not going and you're updating it, it can atrophy over time. So I think that you create a form and you create it with what your best practices are in mind at the time that you create it.

But you know, a great example is — plug for Paul and the folks at Stripe — released Link a couple years ago, which is the fastest growing digital wallet on the planet, right? Is that something that you've been able to add to your form? At Bloomerang, we added it for folks because we knew how important it was and how fast it's growing and how many people are using it.

But even things like maybe at the time that you released your form you didn't use gift assist, which is an important feature for us for covering, you know, donation fees — have you gone back and have you revisited that decision? Digital wallets have gotten bigger, there's forms and pieces of functionality on a form, something like gift assist, something like we have, like smart amounts, that maybe you haven't taken the time to add into your form. And it's going back and revisiting the decisions that you've had.

And I touched on it kind of earlier, just it's hard. What's the right amount of time to go back? Do you want to be babysitting your form? Is it your job to stay up to date on all the things happening in the payments world? You have a nonprofit to run, and that's probably not at the forefront of your mind. So it's incumbent upon, I think, me and my seat to help folks understand what those things are. It's the best discussion to be able to have with somebody.

What if I can increase what you're raising, the amount that you're raising with no effort, right? Having Link on your form is going to increase your conversion rate by X amount, and it's not going to take any effort for you to be able to do that. It's a really easy way for us to lean into our most important value proposition and not ask for anything in return from our customers other than they just raise more for their mission.

Ann Fellman: Yeah, you hit on something I think that deserves a bit more attention and it gets a lot of attention, especially in online giving, and that is the conversation around fees. So Paul, I wanna turn to you. When we talk about processing fees, right, there's a couple of different layers to unpack here, but we talk about processing fees, what are they? And you know, why does covering them even come up at the time of checkout?

Paul Kramer: We're getting right into it a few minutes in. Yeah, I guess I'll start with demystifying that a bit because fees got talked about like they're a nonprofit problem, but they're really not. Every time a card gets used anywhere, right, a few different parties each kind of take a small piece. It's kind of the financial network — that can be the card network, so think Visa, MasterCard, Amex, that can be the bank that issued the card, that can be the payment service provider, that can be the processor. So there's a lot of different kind of players who actually make a financial transaction happen.

It works out to a small percentage plus a few cents usually. And it's the same when you buy groceries versus when you make a gift. So it's just the cost of moving that money safely, securely, all of that. Now, nobody at the grocery store asks if you'd like to cover the card fee. Why is that?

Why does it come up on the donation page? Because the donor isn't buying a thing. They're trying to get a specific amount to a cause that they care about. So asking them, would you like the full hundred dollars to reach us, is a very, very fair question on the nonprofit's part. And it's really the only kind of checkout where that question makes sense.

So where I'd kind of encourage people to be careful is the difference between covering a fee and leaving a tip. Fee coverage means make my gift whole. It's about the donor's intent. A tip here means here's a little bit extra for the platform in giving reasonably accessible technology to the nonprofit. That's a different thing. It can be perfectly fine, but it isn't about the donor's gift. It's about supporting the payment platform.

I think where it goes wrong is when those two get blended into one and the donor can't read it. People are generous, but they're not naive. And as soon as that processing fee is not, you know, two, three percent — it's upwards of 10% in some cases — if they see a number they don't understand, they're gonna hesitate in that process. And a hesitating donor is one step too close to closing the donation tab.

So in terms of what actually works here, there's kind of four key things I would suggest. And none of them are really difficult on the nonprofit's part considering the technology that's made available to them.

First, show the dollar amount, not just a percentage. $1.47 reads as reasonable; 2.2% plus this many cents, and this is the calculation we're doing, asks the donor to do math, and nobody really wants to do the math when they're trying to be generous.

Second, you want to put one sentence on where it goes. Something like, this covers the card processing fees, so your full gift can reach us. That's it, like a nice simple sentence.

Third, you want to make the choice easy to see and easy to change. Both are very important. You're gonna have a checkbox, a toggle, whatever kind of fits in. The donor should never have to hunt for trying to turn off those fees.

And fourth, never spring it to the last screen. I think in retail, an unexpected cost at the final step is actually one of the biggest reasons that people abandon a purchase, and donors aren't more patient than shoppers, right? They're just kinder.

And that pattern holds across everything we see. Show the cost early and explain it plainly and people tend to say yes to it, but let it show up at the end as a surprise and they don't. The fee was, I don't think, ever the problem. It's typically the surprise of being sprung in the last moment.

So, you know, the way I'd put it, being clear about the fee isn't just the right thing to do. It's just what works with people. And the whole way through, the choice belongs to the donor. We're talking about how you present that choice and not really moving away from it. And Evan actually put this to a test. So I'm curious to hear what he saw.

Ann Fellman: Evan, you ran a real test on this where pre-checking that fee coverage box versus leaving it blank. So can you walk us through what happened?

Evan DaSilva: Yeah, we were super interested to understand what the behavior was around leaving this pre-checked or not. I'm a behavioral economics nerd, so this is like a really great test to run, you know, almost like in a psychology laboratory, to see what effect it could have.

When we run tests, one of the most important things we do is we put guardrails in place around those tests. And our most important guardrail is how does it affect conversion rates? So it's like, okay, it's great if the test runs and more people use gift assist. Awesome. But what if we've significantly decreased the amount of conversions that you get on your page, the amount of people who actually donate to your nonprofit?

So that was the most important guardrail on this test. When we looked at it, the amazing thing was that we saw when the box wasn't pre-checked, we saw about a 49% conversion rate with the gift assist. Not bad. But when the box is pre-checked, we saw it go up to nearly 74%. So over a 50% increase in the amount of people who choose to cover the fees if you pre-check that box. And the best part was the conversion rate was essentially identical — no difference between the two, between the test and the control.

So folks are 50% more likely to add in gift assist to cover the cost of the donation fees if you pre-check that box, and they're just as likely to give one way or another.

So as we ran this, it felt like a really great opportunity for our nonprofits to increase their revenue, to take advantage of donor generosity. Paul, I'm gonna steal that line — that was such a good line. Donors are no different than consumers, they're just kinder. I love that.

This is kind of a no-brainer consumer behavior, right? A consumer workflow that you would expect that you would see outside of the nonprofit world that I think folks have been hesitant to take advantage of. And the big hesitancy is, I don't want to affect the number of donations I get. I feel like people are going to opt out if they see that that's pre-checked. And the reality is they're not going to. I believe that a lot of people just miss it in the workflow if you don't pre-check it, and they choose not to add on the gift. So it's an easy way for our customers to add fuel to their mission without any impact to the donor experience.

Ann Fellman: Yeah, that's a really important call out. It's like eliminating the friction, right, and kind of the thought process behind that. And then going back to some of the key highlights, Paul, that you hit on of early and often, no surprise at the end, right, in terms of being really clear, communicating what those things are. I think bringing that test of what works and getting the fees covered, but with really clear communication, you can really do a lot in terms of strong donor relationships, donor trust.

So, Paul, if you had to point to just one payment side thing that's simple to fix but is easy to miss on a lot of forms that you see, what would you point to?

Paul Kramer: You know, I was gonna say fees, but we just spent 10 minutes talking about that. So I'll speak to digital wallets — digital wallets that aren't turned on. I think are my biggest thing. I actually worked at Apple Pay before coming to Stripe for a summer. And if you're running a food bank or a shelter or an after school program, the checkout page isn't where your attention should be. That's what people like Evan and me are for. Let us worry about that.

This isn't really a mistake anyone made. It's just a setting that's easy to walk past. It's an option somewhere in your settings — make sure they're on. Imagine a beautiful storefront with a front door that sticks. Everything about it is in the right place, and people still turn around because the door is annoying. That's a donation form without Apple Pay, Google Pay, any of those.

The donor's phone already knows their card. We're asking them to kind of ignore that and type it in anyway. The amount of donation forms I still come across on multi-hundred million, if not billion dollar nonprofits, where it's please enter your home address, please enter your card number. And there isn't an option to like scan your card or use something like Link where you just enter your phone number. Like, no, I have to manually sit there, search for my wallet, get out that card. And you know, working in payments, it's just absurd.

And Evan, I'd love to see actually the drop-off rates of manual card entry versus using Link or Apple Pay or some type of optimized checkout. At Stripe, we've run some internal tests and there's obscene differences. Here's something anybody can do tonight: pull out Bloomerang and make sure the wallets are enabled.

Pull up your own donation form on your phone. I have this thing I call the thumb test, where essentially you just use your thumb to try to check out. But if you have to zoom in, if you have to type, if you have to do anything else, like use more than your thumb, it's a bad donation form because the standard has been set by the private sector, and we gotta make sure that the nonprofit sector kind of keeps up with that. If you have to scroll around to find the button, you've also found another fix.

So most teams have never done this. They don't really go through their own donation flow. They're just focused on like let's get as many people to the donation page as possible. But the actual checkout flow itself is just as important as the actual inflow. So if you think of the funnel, you want it to be really straight. Like you just want people to come in and you want them to check out. There should be no friction that kind of causes it to narrow down, right?

But I think Evan, you have the actual numbers of what this looks like on Bloomerang forms, right?

Evan DaSilva: Yeah, I do. I have the actual numbers, and I think, you know, one thing to hit on before I give them to you is just this is found money, right? If you've done all the work to get folks to your donation form and they're falling off because you don't have the most effective, efficient donation experience in place, you're just costing yourself revenue for your mission.

We see when we have Express Donate, which is a feature that's a one touch tap donate feature using digital wallets, it's a 55% higher conversion rate. And if you think about it right, we see the giving trend — you see it too from your side of Stripe — the giving trend is definitely skewed right towards a little bit later in the year, the giving season. I think that there's a lot that kind of happens in a March time frame as well.

But for, you know, the sake of the giving season kind of kicking off on Thanksgiving — Giving Tuesday is huge after Thanksgiving, and you think about Giving Tuesday and how many people save up their giving. You've been using the example of nonprofit, and the experience shouldn't be any different than the consumer experience, right? And it's like Giving Tuesday is kind of the nonprofit's answer to Black Friday.

So okay, there's the parallel there, and everyone is saving up to do a lot of their giving on Giving Tuesday. So now you're a kind, generous person, you're a donor, you're going to your 10 favorite nonprofits to make a donation to each one of them. How torturous is it to have to enter all of your information 10 different times? I know that there's moments where you want to capture all that, but on Giving Tuesday, having Express Donate is such an important day for so many organizations.

Take it easier on your donors. Make it a one-touch experience for them to give. Capture the donation, capture the fuel for your mission. Don't make them do all the extra keystrokes that it takes, you know. And doing that 10x — it's a Tuesday, even though it's Giving Tuesday for nonprofits, it's a working day for everybody else. We're trying to get through our donations as quickly as we can so we can get back to our day jobs.

So it's a great example of when saving your donors some time can be the fuel that it provides your mission, but it will delight your donors and the experience that they have in being able to give to your organization.

Ann Fellman: Yeah. And the thumb test, I mean, that's brilliant, because I don't know how many times you're like trying to make a donation and you don't have the time to pull out the credit card, or you're sitting in a work meeting and you're deciding to make a donation really quick, right? You know, like how do I do that with one hand? The wallet option is a really slick way. It's really sad that I do have my credit card memorized.

But you know, I don't need to if the form allows for a faster checkout. Let's talk recurring giving, right? That's a really important element, Paul, for a number of nonprofits. So when you think about just kind of setting up like the subscription, if you will, right, recurring, I want to give monthly. What is Stripe seeing right now in this area of recurring giving, and is year end actually a good moment to make that ask? What do you see?

Paul Kramer: I kind of want to dissuade nonprofits from thinking that recurring is purely a nonprofit thing. We're starting to see this as just a way people pay for things. Look at anyone's bank statement — streaming, music, the gym, meal kits. The habit of a small amount coming out every month, and I don't think about it, is already there. I just got an Amazon subscription for my multivitamins.

You know, you're not teaching donors a new behavior. You're borrowing one that they already have. And you're kind of trying to take advantage of the fact that everyone's just used to recurring giving now. And when I do my budgeting, I just put $150 towards recurring subscriptions I have, things I've subscribed to, whether it be physical goods or otherwise.

Is year end the right time to ask? I think it is, as long as you frame it the right way, right? A year-end donor is about as warm as a donor gets. I think we see about a third of giving happening in the month of December, between Giving Tuesday and the final day of the year. They've already decided that you, your organization, your mission matters to them. They're already on your page. You've probably spent some money marketing to get them to that page. So don't use that moment to ask for a bigger gift — use it to ask a different question.

Would you like this to keep going? Would you like this relationship? Would you like this donation to keep going? $25 once, or $10 a month, right? $10 a month any day — the second one is worth so much more to you by spring. And it's much easier on the donor's budget in that given moment as well. So it just makes sense to all parties involved.

The way I think about it, a one-time gift is essentially a handshake. And a monthly gift is someone sticking around, someone who's gonna be reading your newsletters, someone who's gonna be maybe watching a payments podcast that you put out. It's a different type of relationship, and it's worth a lot more. And for whoever kind of builds your budget, knowing in November what January looks like is a real, real gift.

One thing that matters here as well is that cards expire, of course. And a recurring gift is only as durable as the card behind it. So the good news is that the payments infrastructure now updates those details automatically when the bank issues a new card. So the gift kind of keeps giving without the donor having to do anything, having to go in, update their card, that kind of thing. And that's the difference between a monthly donor lasting eight months and a donor lasting eight years.

If I could leave people behind with, I guess, three small things from everything I just talked about: number one, put the monthly option where people can actually see it — really important, not just behind a tab. Two, you want to suggest a monthly amount that's smaller than the one-time amount. And three, you want to thank your monthly donors like they did something meaningful, because they did — they're building a relationship with your organization.

Ann Fellman: Love that — those are really important insights, and we see it time and time again, those organizations that put some energy behind monthly giving programs, like the exponential donations that they can realize over five years is nothing short of significant. It's pretty amazing to see.

So we're gonna go into just a short little lightning round for both of you. If a nonprofit could only look at one thing on their donation form before December 31st, what would both of you tell them to check first? So Evan, I'm gonna pick on you first.

Evan DaSilva: It's like asking me to choose between my kids, Ann. I mean, I love gift assist, I love Express—

Ann Fellman: Sorry.

Evan DaSilva: —Donate, I love recurring nudges, I love abandoning reminders. They're all very one.

Ann Fellman: One thing, one thing, one thing.

Evan DaSilva: I think it's Express Donate. I think the increase in conversion that we see, especially in giving season, is so critical at such an important time of year.

But I also think it ties into so many other important trends with digital wallets, right? Making sure that they're all enabled — they are a growing payment method that we're seeing across our customer base. And then that's also tied to, generationally, we need to be pulling in more millennials, right? More and more millennials and Gen Z, they are giving with digital wallets. So using Express Donate — Paul, you said it earlier, you have to meet the donor where they are — the donors are increasingly using digital wallets and that Express Donate experience. So absolutely, I would encourage folks to go enable all their digital wallets and tie them to Express Donate before they hit the giving season.

Ann Fellman: Okay, well that was maybe more than one thing. But Paul, I'm gonna pick on you now.

Evan DaSilva: Yeah.

Ann Fellman: But it's all really good advice. Paul, what would be the one thing that they should check first?

Paul Kramer: Well, technically Evan's was Express Donate, so mine is gonna be wallet options. Looking at the numbers, I think wallet options are the most important — having Link, having Apple Pay, Google Pay, especially for Gen Z, as my generation continues to give more and more. We're not gonna go searching for our card. I know people who don't even have a physical credit card — they just use Apple Pay for everything.

So seriously, just enable that in your settings.

Ann Fellman: This has been a very good look behind the curtain on what is actually happening the moment someone hits that donation form online.

If you want to see the full list of findings, we've got some research that Bloomerang and Stripe have been building out. So you can head to the Fundraising Innovation Hub — we're going to drop the link in the show notes. So take a look at those. Paul, Evan, thank you so much for being here today. And to all the listeners out there, thanks for joining and listening into Fuel Impact by Bloomerang. We're going to be back again very soon with another fundraising expert doing remarkable work for the sector. Until then, keep fueling your impact.

Thanks again, Paul and Evan.

Ann Fellman: Thanks for watching Fuel Impact. Subscribe for more real conversations with leaders shaping the nonprofit sector. Learn more at Bloomerang.com.