Hello,
I want to start a thread on the donation page. When I have been working on it, I had a few ideas and discovered a few problems with the flow. So I tried to change them, but am quite unsure if I came to the right conclusions...
So this page...
...is supposed to encourage people to set up a recurring donation to the project. We benefit most from smaller regular donations than one- time donations. Therefore the process should be quick and easy.
We have a few legal requirements which don't make this too easy for us to design an effortless process. The main issue with that is the address that we need. We need that to process payment and we will have to store it for tax records.
This used to be a pop-up before and I moved this to the main box now because of two reasons:
* We should be up-front that this is a requirement and not surprise people with the pop-up
* I would like to have a pop-up that encourages people to change their one-time donation to a monthly one and two pop-ups feel a little bit annoying.
That makes the main box a little bit large, but I think that at least it has all steps on it.
Then, I removed the payment methods. This is easier to ask that in the backend and it would require some changes in the code there to make it work. We also don't always offer all payment options. Hence it is good that we know the amount and currency beforehand.
I kept the icons though and moved then underneath the donate button because we should still show which payment options are potentially available. Can we add a logo for SEPA here?
I am also considering to remove PayPal entirely. They are just a pain to deal with and ridiculously expensive. Credit card and SEPA should cover payments from anywhere in the world and easy and flexible.
After someone has gone through the process, they will receive an email with a PDF document that contains the SEPA mandate if they have chosen SEPA. In case of credit card, there won't be any emails.
The bank statements or credit card bill will have a link to the accounting software to end any recurring donations. I have considered sending a thank you email with a link, but people would loose it. Sending an email every time we take a payment is very annoying.
Then, there is the pop-up to think about. I have no idea what that could look like. It should be nice and ask if the user would prefer to do a monthly donation of the amount that they have selected divided by four. So we should make a suggestion and make it one click to make it recurring. There should also be a "no thanks" option that just continues with the one-time payment.
Potentially we won't show the pop-up for donations that are 10 EUR or USD. It doesn't make too much sense to break them into smaller monthly payments.
Does anyone have any ideas for a good wording?
Finally, I changed the split layout because it didn't feel natural to me to either fill in one or the other side to pick an amount to donate. Although there was a big "OR", I am personally happier with having those aligned from top to bottom. Comments?
So that's it for now. I will hopefully find some time next week to write the texts for that page and maybe others. It doesn't come very natural to me, but I will give it a try. Hopefully we will be able to tell what the final shape of the page is going to be.
Best, -Michael