24 April 2019

Five Incredible UX Design Tools to Influence your Donors

Does your nonprofit website:

make it easier for visitors to access information;
encourage visitors to donate to your cause;
attract volunteers to get involved;
build trust with visitors for them to continue to donate; and
increase digital engagement on social media pages?

A website, no matter how nice it looks, is nothing if its user experience (UX or UX Design) is bad. Studies of UX for nonprofits indicate that good UX alone can influence donor behavior and increase online conversions. Since the only thing separating your nonprofit and potential donors is a screen, it is critical that your organization focuses on designing a good UX strategy to make an excellent first impression.

UX Design is all about enhancing the overall experience of those interacting with your website. In order to attract donors, volunteers and constituents to your nonprofit website, it is important for your web designers to continuously work on improving UX. When a potential donor visits the website, you have only seconds to influence them, make them feel comfortable to access information and make a donation. This can be achieved with the right content and good design.

UX Designers, are tasked with resolving difficult questions such as “what do donors want?”, “why do donors abandon our donation page so often?”, “how to pick between multiple designs?”, “why are visitors abandoning the second page of a subscription form or event registration form?” and so on. These tough questions require a lot of research, testing, and analysis, but nonprofits don’t always have the luxury of sufficient time and resources. Thankfully, there are a lot of spectacular UX Design tools that will improve digital engagements with visitor and increase donor conversions.

Alla Gringaus, UX Designer and Solution Architect, recently conducted a workshop on Challenges of UX Design for Nonprofits sponsored by WebServes (https://www.meetup.com/NPTC-NYC/). She discussed how some of the UX Design tools are changing the game and how nonprofits can utilize these inexpensive tools to enhance donor experience on your website.

According to Alla, we can broadly classify UX Design Tools into five categories ->

UX Research
UX Testing
UX Inspiration
UX Documentation and Templates
UX Customer Feedback

UX Research

Focus is on understanding donor behaviors, needs, and motivations through different techniques. Tools help to focus on gathering and interpreting data systematically.

Hotjar is one of the popular tools to conduct UX research. Features like heatmaps, session recordings will allow you to watch how any visitor is interacting with your website. You can look at their behavior and ask the right questions at the right time.

You can create your free business account and earn a 50% discount for your nonprofit

UX Testing

Understanding how potential donors use your website to access information about your cause is very important. It is one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase audience engagement and get conversions.

Usability Hub is one such tool which enables you to select between multiple designs. You can upload mockups/screenshots and get solid feedback from other unbiased designers in minutes. It is free for first 20 tests and nonprofits also get up to 50% off paid plans.

UX Inspiration

Tools like Dropmark help you perform better as a team. It is designed to gather clients, coworkers, and co-conspirators in one place so you can get the feedback you need to create the best user experience. Drag and drop features allow you to organize all your links, files and notes into a visual collection for you and your team to see.

UX Documentation & Templates

Documentation is not just a compilation of all the deliverables generated but a powerful way to tell your project’s story. It helps to constantly improve the process, organize ideas and onboard new team members. With the help of the right tool, the task of creating a 500-page document may not seem so humongous. Xtensio is a popular choice; it has lots of templates and helps you define personas, brainstorm ideas and develop strategies.

UX Customer Feedback

It is no secret that creating positive donor experience will result in meeting your fundraising objectives. But what’s the best way to achieve a great UX? Listening. Actively listening to your website users and implementing a user feedback solution on your nonprofit website will attract donors.