“Fill in the blank” and “name your amount” aren’t just things you hear on a game show. Many nonprofits make this open-ended offer on their donation pages. It can be less pushy and unrestricted. But who said setting limits was always bad? Parameters can actually be about possibilities. Setting specific giving levels on your donate page can be a good thing if they can influence (and hopefully increase) donations.
What are Giving Levels?
Giving levels offer donors choices in the form of pre-set amounts. Rather than leaving a blank space for a donor to enter an amount, giving levels provide benchmarks that can influence the actual donation.
Setting Your Giving Levels
This can amount to a high/low game. When setting your giving levels, start by looking at your smallest and largest donation amounts as a good benchmark. So if your largest donation is $200, consider setting your highest level to $250 or $300. You could also determine what the average gift is and bump it up a bit. Your goal is obviously to encourage bigger donations, but you also want to be within the general realm of what has historically been donated.
Tell Donors What Their Money Will Support
Your giving levels can serve as a real-time needs statement for your organization. Offering giving levels highlights your nonprofit’s greatest needs and tells donors how donations can help support that. Be specific: include numbers, faces and details behind your ask. Is it medical supplies for a family? A meal for a family of four? A set of textbooks for a classroom of 20 students? The more detailed you can get, the more people can get behind your specific ask. Making the need real can make the request actionable. Your donors will be able to picture in a concrete way the good their money will enable.
Examples of Giving Levels
We’ve rounded up a few examples of nonprofits that use giving levels to enhance the donation process:
ChildFund
This is clean, simple and effective. ChildFund has just three giving levels that will buy bikes for girls to get to school. Easy as that. There’s also an option to provide a custom amount, but the simplicity and ease of this ask is effective. It’s immediately clear to the donor what their money will support, and really then just becomes a matter of how many bikes to buy.
Juma
Juma has a donate page with giving levels that display the progression of amounts to motivate donors to see how their money can be spent. With levels as low as $50 to as high as $5,000, these levels show how this nonprofit determines and measures impact with a wide scope of options available to choose from.
The Girl Effect
The Girl Effect features a narrative summary that gives a global overview of the project. The giving levels get more granular, specifically showing how a donation as small as $10 can make a difference. Each giving level represents an opportunity to help 10-25 girls.
United Nations Population Fund
The language used in the giving levels for The United Nations Population Fund is incredibly powerful. Under “Give to emergency response,” the donation request is expressed in a way that not only highlights the tangible needs (“hygiene essentials”) of what a donation will support, but also speaks to an intangible benefit (“enabling her to maintain her dignity”). The second option to “Help end fistula” frames the need in a preemptive way that could compel donations: preventing the problem of this pregnancy-related condition by paying for a woman’s C-section.
Exodus Cry
Aided by the clean design and use of icons, the donation descriptions in Exodus Cry effectively captures the scope of this nonprofit’s work and gives equal attention to each giving level. The set-up here is a bit different since the descriptions of where the money will go don’t directly correspond to the giving levels below (with the exception of the $100 amount). I like this method, though, because it can encourage donors to more thoughtfully weigh the math for how to maximize their donation and can be powerfully suggestive in motivating donors to choose how their money will be spent (or stretched).
Does your nonprofit use giving levels? Do you have any other examples of websites who use this method to encourage donations? I’d love to hear from you in the comments (and feel free to drop us a link).