I was asked if it was possible to add donate buttons to a Virgin Money Giving charity account with the amounts predefined. I had not done that before, so I did some research and I will comment later on what I found out. First though some thoughts on fundraising.
Some people ask for a donate button that goes straight to the donation portal (external website), ideally this will go to the account page for that charity. I don’t generally recommend doing this from anywhere on your website, because the action associated with the button is to leave your site and go somewhere else. A user may be surprised to see the format and page layout change and clearly be on another site, and may ask themselves the question; “is this the right place, or has someone tampered with the website?”
Why might they think that?
Well, in the first instance, having a donate button everywhere (other than on fundraising page) is rather like thrusting a tin under your nose while out shopping. While I have no doubts that you all represent worthy causes, don’t forget to be successful fundraising you need to establish the value proposition first; why is it a worthy cause? Then you are more likely to receive a donation.
The other problem here is that with no warning you are forcing your potential donor to go to another website. There is nothing wrong with that, but I would always advocate your donation button distributed around your website, perhaps in the header; jumps first to your Donations, Fundraising or Support Us page. Here you make the value proposition; why us, what we do with the money, how far does £20 go, the value of regular rather donations than a single donation etc etc?
Related to this, is the warning that in order to donate you need to do it through your account on a partner website. Then it is less of surprise when they click on a button that it goes to another website.
Tailor the landing page at your fundraising partner
You may find you do not have a lot of leeway here based on my experience. It is important that your logo and some other key visual indicators are present to reassure the visitor that they are on Your Account page, and not a page belonging to someone else, or a worse still a phishing site. (A phishing site is a website that is operated by criminals attempting to trick you into entering your username, password, and perhaps financial information). If they think they may be on someone else’s page they will leave, and you have lost the opportunity.
Recapping
If you want multiple donation buttons on your site, say on every page, make sure they all go to the fundraising or equivalent page
Make sure your fundraising page establishes a firm value proposition which justifies a donation
Explain that you collect donations through a partner website and when they click on the appropriate link that is where they will go (and the site opens in a new browser window).
Make sure your account on the destination website shares your branding, logo, images and other content to confirm they donor is in the right place.
Returning to the buttons for Virgin Money Giving
With Virgin Money Giving you have several choices in terms of linking from your website to your account on their website. I am not going to show you how to create the buttons, but I am going to show you how the link works. There are some pages on their site that explains how this works but this short list shows you what is possible from your site to their site:
- Link to your fundraising page
- Link to the donations page (this is different to your fundraising page at Virgin Money Giving)
- Link to a featured fundraising page by a friend or colleague collecting on behalf of your charity
- Link to the donations page and prefill the form in with the amount (aka a single donation)
- Link to the donations page and prefill the form in with an amount and monthly direct debit
There may be more than this, but these are the ones I have found.
I am going to show you four examples using this charity: Home-Start Winchester as an example. All the following links do is take you to pages at Virgin Money Giving, and in some cases fill in some of the forms there. By clicking on them you are not making a donation, however I am sure they would be more than happy if you did.
Case one:
Link to Home-Start Winchester Account page at Virgin Money Giving.
On the page you can see the Home-Start Logo some information about the organisation and links back to their website. There is another page, which is where the donations are made. That is here:
Case two:
This URL goes to the page where the funds are taken from the donor.
URL:
https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/donation-web/charity?charityId=1006761&stop_mobi=yes
It looks as though in this case there are some default values set up by the configuration of the page as it defaulted to £30 for me.
Case three:
I cannot connect to any campaign in this case because I am unaware of any running currently. But that is possible if you have someone doing a sponsored event.
Case four:
Here I want to have a button which will say “Please donate £10”. The URL can carry some of the information to the website and configure the form. In this case it is a single donation. Try this:
URL:
https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/donation-web/charity?charityId=1006761&donationAmount=10
You can see that within the URL is the following &donationAmount=10 if you were to hand craft the URL and change the 10 to say 23 it will place £23 in the form like this.
URL:
https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/donation-web/charity?charityId=1006761&donationAmount=23
Case five
Here I want to create a button which will say “Please donate £10 per month”. The URL for this carries some additional information about the donation type.
In this case there is an additional parameter on the end of the URL called frequencyType=M where M is Monthly.
You can read the detail of this on the Virgin Money Giving website and how to create your own.