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What are the best practices for setting up my contribution page?

Discover how RevEngine's default contribution page layout is optimized with baked-in best practices to maximize recurring donor revenue.

If a reader is impressed by your work and decides to support your publication, the layout and preselected options on your contribution page could go a long way in determining how much they’ll donate to your organization and how often they’ll do it.

What we know

A well-designed contribution page can maximize dollars, encourage loyalty, and provide a seamless contribution experience, all while collecting valuable data about your supporters. We know this because our team spent a half-decade helping newsrooms raise money, and closely tracked how small design tweaks to a contribution page could influence contributor behavior. We channeled what we learned into RevEngine. The default settings on RevEngine contribution pages are optimized to maximize revenue and loyalty for your newsroom.

While there are times when you’ll want to tweak the content to coincide with a special campaign or event, we don’t recommend tinkering too much with the default settings in the contribution forms - it’ll be hard to improve upon what’s already there.

The good news? Best practices are already baked in

Here are some of the ways that we integrated best practices into our default designs:

  1. We set an ambitious but reasonable suggested donation
    • It’s better to default to an aspirational dollar figure than lowball yourself. When we studied giving propensity among small newsrooms, we found that nudging contributors toward a higher dollar amount increased the total amount of money raised. This is why RevEngine has a default suggested donation of $15 per month.
  2. We nudge readers toward recurring monthly contributions, not one-time or annual ones
    • Since we’ve found that on average monthly contributors remain active and give longer than people who make one-time contributions, the default contribution on RevEngine is a monthly gift instead of a yearly installment.
  3. We collect detailed address data
    • Our contribution forms have full address fields and will ask for a donor’s zip code and city in addition to their street address. This data can help you screen for potential high-dollar donors, so we recommend collecting it if you ever plan to have a major donor program.
  4. We give contributors a chance to engage with your organization
    • The final field on the page asks contributors to give a brief explanation of why they’re supporting you. You can use this anecdotal data to influence your campaign strategy and inspire your staff.