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Increasing Samaritans online donations revenue by 200%

Last year, Samaritans set us a tough challenge. They needed a complete overhaul of their main public website to launch their new brand and drive more income, but not at the expense of providing critical support services for people in distress.

Samaritans is an amazing organisation: every year, more than 20,000 listening volunteers answer more than 5 million calls for help by phone, email, SMS, letter, or face to face – that’s one every 6 seconds. Their website is a vital tool for helping people access these services.

But, like any large charity, Samaritans’ website is an important tool for raising money to enable them to recruit more volunteers and develop new services, and their old Drupal site was not working hard enough for them.

Samaritans

5 mins read

Related work categories Digital products Wagtail Charity & non-profit

We need to deliver the right digital services to people who may be in crisis, are worried about somebody else or who want to learn more about mental health issues and suicide.

Katie Colombus, Samaritans Assistant Director of Digital, Brand and Engagement

Increasing income by 200%

To increase Samaritans' online revenue (by 200% compared with the same period of the last year), we adopted three core principles:

  1. More compelling calls to action - Share the impact and need for donations in a way that compels people to donate and get more people into the donation funnel
  2. Improve the donations journey - Improve the user interface and mechanics of the donation process itself, to increase conversion, resulting in fewer people dropping out of the process
  3. Increase average donation amounts - Encourage a higher spend once a user has decided they’re ready to make a gift

Optimising Calls to Action (CTAs)

samaritansheader.jpg

Website header

Making the right ask at the right time has a big impact on people’s propensity to donate (just look at the Guardian’s success). And having control over your CTAs and their placement on the site means you don’t interfere with important service user journeys.

Within Wagtail, Samaritans' editors can choose the most appropriate CTA and add it wherever they feel will work best on the page. They then use Google Analytics to see quantitative data on the performance of the CTA, and amend the page accordingly.

We also made a strong case for a simple, focussed information architecture, with the site navigation and main calls to action structured around the two primary audience groups (“service users” and “supporters”). This has helped to give the majority of users a really quick route to what they need (and drive more traffic to the donate page).

Getting more users through the donations funnel

We looked at Samaritans' donation analytics and saw 65% of people dropping out from the donation landing page, 50% more from the next stage, and 40% of those who remained not actually making a donation. Each of these steps was a significant friction point.

We knew that one of the main ways we would increase income through the site was to streamline this process with a much better designed and really thoughtful donation journey.

We built Wagtail-powered donation landing pages that clearly communicate the need for donations and how the money is spent. Our solution gives Samaritans the flexibility to run (and test) multiple variants of donation landing pages, forms, and thank you content - each tailored to individual campaigns throughout the year.

We used Braintree Payments - a modern, global payment processing solution for payments by card, PayPal and Google Pay (Apple Pay is on the way too). Making it clear up front that people have lots of ways to pay builds confidence that the process will be hassle-free, and helps get people through the funnel.

We also redesigned the transactional forms, streamlining the user journey and reducing the number of form fields - this alone helped increase conversion rate by 142% (April 2019 vs April 2018).

One of the cool things Wagtail lets us do is make variations of our donate page, so when we run a new campaign, we can create a new entrance to the donate journey with different visuals, copy and price points. Before, we’d need to pay developers to do this for every campaign we ran, but now we can do it all in-house. We can give them codes so we can attribute the income to different audiences too, which keeps our fundraising and data teams happy!

Michael Keating, Samaritans Head of Digital

Increasing average donation amounts

We identified a few more quick wins that could add up to significant overall increases:

  • PayPal donors were being sent down a separate, simpler donation route which meant they weren’t seeing the recommended donation amounts, resulting in lower average PayPal donations compared with credit card donations. (Samaritans also couldn’t collect communications preferences from Paypal donors, so they couldn’t build relationships with them). With our new Braintree-powered solution, PayPal (as well as Google Pay and Apple Pay) is fully integrated into a single donation user experience, and now PayPal donors are giving more.
  • The average donation value was actually higher than the suggested amounts on the donation form, so we raised the default suggested amounts with the aim of nudging up the average gift.
  • We know that, on average, mobile donation values are lower, so we’ve used personalisation to tailor suggested donation amounts by device type – doing this helps increase the average values more intelligently.
  • Thanks to better analytics instrumentation, Samaritans now know more about the sources of their donations (for example, 14% of gifts are made in memoriam and 8%or comes from corporate donors), which will allow them to improve and iterate over time.

Awards and recognition

The new website has been:

We chose Torchbox and the Wagtail platform solution because we’re currently underway with an exciting process of digital transformation here at Samaritans where all kinds of systems are coming together to ensure that our ways of working are future proofed, data driven and solutions focused

Katie Colombus, Samaritans Assistant Director of Digital, Brand and Engagement

What’s next?

With their new Wagtail platform, Samaritans are able to routinely test copy, images, calls to action and suggested donation amounts to ensure that every step of the donation journey is as effective it can be. So (as D:ream once put it) - things can only get better.

In other news, we’ve launched Samaritans’ Wagtail-powered intranet serving their staff and 20k volunteers, and we will soon be launching an exciting new digital product, which will form a key part of Samaritans’ service delivery.

I can confidently say this project wouldn’t have gone as well in the hands of any other agency. The team at Torchbox understood our needs and in many cases anticipated them. They helped keep our focus on our users and what Samaritans can do to help them either find support, or support us

Michael Keating, Samaritans Head of Digital

Learn more about our approach.

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Dave Harris

Client Partner (Charity Sector)

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