The donation page mistakes quietly costing your charity income

Your donation page is the most valuable page on your website. Every click, every pound spent on ads, every email opened and every share leads here. It is where you either turn effort into income or quietly lose it — and a lot of it does leak.

Here is the number that should stop you. In the M+R and Rally 2025 UK & Ireland Benchmarks, mobile drove 68% of charity website visits but only 43% of online revenue. Desktop, on a third of the traffic, produced 57% of the money. Charities are bringing people in on their phones and banking the income on desktop. Anything lost in that gap is money you have already paid to attract.

And there is not much slack to give away. UK and Irish online revenue actually fell 2% in 2024, and across all participants only 2.1% of website visitors made a donation, worth a median of £1.30 per visitor (M+R/Rally, 2025). When the pool is shrinking and most visitors never give, the donation page stops being a housekeeping task and becomes the highest-leverage page you own.

68% → 43%

Mobile drives 68% of charity website visits but only 43% of online revenue (M+R/Rally, 2025).

£32 vs £95

Median mobile gift against the median desktop gift. The real device gap is gift size, not conversion.

48%

Of UK & Ireland online revenue now comes from regular giving — the one line still growing.

The good news is that it is also one of the easiest things to improve. Small changes here compound across every campaign that leads to it. Here are the mistakes we see most often, roughly in order of what they cost you — and how to fix them.

Mistake 1: Treating the mobile experience as an afterthought

This is the big one, and the benchmarks make it concrete. If two-thirds of your visitors arrive on a phone but most of your income lands on desktop, your mobile experience is where the opportunity sits.

But read the data carefully, because the usual diagnosis is slightly wrong. Mobile is not mainly failing to convert. In the UK and Ireland the main donation-page conversion rate was almost identical across devices — 11% on mobile against 12% on desktop (M+R/Rally, 2025). The real gap is in what people give. The median gift was £32 on mobile versus £95 on desktop. People are perfectly willing to start on their phones; they just give smaller amounts when they do.

Mobile doesn't fail to convert. It fails to ask for more.

Mobile and desktop convert almost identically — 11% against 12%. The gap is what people give: £32 on a phone versus £95 on desktop. So don't chase mobile conversions. Help people give more confidently on a small screen.

So the more useful question is not "why won't mobile convert?" but "why is the mobile gift worth a third of the desktop one, and what would help someone give more confidently on a small screen?" That points at suggested amounts, a clear regular-giving option, fast payment, and a page that loads and reads well at arm's length on a train.

One test: pull up your own donation form on your phone, right now, and try to give. Does it load quickly? Is the donate button obvious? Can you complete it without pinching, zooming or endless scrolling? If it feels like hard work for you, think about how it feels for a supporter you have interrupted mid-scroll.

Mistake 2: Too many fields, too much friction

Every extra field on your form is another small reason to give up.

It is natural to want to collect information at the point of donation — title, address, phone number, how someone heard about you. But every required field is friction, and friction has a measurable cost. In Baymard Institute's checkout research, the average online checkout now contains 11.3 form fields when most only need around 8, and 17% of people have abandoned a purchase because the process was too long or complicated (Baymard Institute, 2024). Across 49 studies, Baymard puts the average documented cart-abandonment rate at roughly 70% (Baymard, 2025). Donation forms are not shopping carts, but the psychology of "this is taking too long" is the same.

Keep your form to what you genuinely need to process the gift. Ask for the rest later — on the thank-you page or in the welcome journey, once the donation is already complete. At the moment of giving, every field you remove is friction eliminated between a willing supporter and a finished gift.

Mistake 3: Not offering the payment methods people actually want

When someone is on their phone, asking them to dig out a card and type in 16 digits is a real barrier — and an avoidable one.

Digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, alongside PayPal, let a supporter give in a couple of taps without breaking stride. Given that mobile now accounts for 68% of charity website visits and 57% of transactions (M+R/Rally, 2025), the payment experience on a phone is not a nice-to-have; it is where most of your traffic is deciding whether to follow through. If your form does not offer wallet payments, you are adding effort at the exact moment you can least afford it.

Mistake 4: Hiding, or failing to highlight, regular giving

Here is a strategic mistake the benchmarks make impossible to ignore. In the UK and Ireland, regular giving now accounts for 48% of all online revenue, and it is the one line still growing: regular giving rose 8% in 2024 while cash giving fell 6% (M+R/Rally, 2025). Regular giving is not the side door anymore. It is holding the sector up.

Yet plenty of donation forms still default to a one-off gift and treat monthly giving as the afterthought. That is a gap worth closing. Try making the monthly option more prominent, or setting it as the default, and watch what it does to your regular-giving numbers.

The maths is on your side. The median regular gift in the benchmarks was £10 a month; the median one-off cash gift was £53. A monthly supporter is worth more than a single cash gift inside the first year — and then keeps going. Your form is the first place a longer-term relationship is either invited or quietly discouraged.

Mistake 5: Breaking the promise the ad made

A supporter clicks your appeal because something caught them — a story, a need, a specific request. If they land on a generic donation page that does not match what moved them, you lose them at the exact moment hesitation creeps in.

Your donation page should continue the story the ad or email started: the same need, the same impact, the same language. That continuity reassures people they are in the right place and reminds them why they wanted to help. It matters more when the traffic is not free — median cost per donation in the benchmarks ranged from £31 on paid search to £61 on Meta and £110 on display advertising (M+R/Rally, 2025). Having paid that to get someone to the page, a disconnected form is an expensive place to lose them.

Mistake 6: Not retargeting the people who abandon

Many people who begin a donation will not finish it. That is simply the reality of online giving. The mistake is not the abandonment; it is doing nothing about it.

The people who reached your form and stopped are among your warmest possible audiences — one or two clicks from giving. A simple, well-judged reminder can recover a meaningful share of them, which tends to make it one of the most efficient lines in a media budget. If your paid search is costing around £31 a donation to acquire someone cold (M+R/Rally, 2025), recovering a near-complete gift for a fraction of that is money most programmes leave on the table.

Mistake 7: Never actually testing it

This is the meta-mistake sitting underneath all the others.

The donation form is often one of the least-tested pages a charity owns. It is tightly controlled, slow to change, and awkward for a busy digital team to touch. Which is extraordinary, given it is the page where the money actually changes hands.

Treat it as the asset it is. Run structured A/B tests on the ask, the layout, the wording, the suggested amounts and the images, and keep improving on what you learn. Remember the headroom: if only about 2% of visitors currently give (M+R/Rally, 2025), even small, compounding gains on the donation page turn directly into more income from every campaign that feeds it. The testing you do here pays back more reliably than almost anything else you can improve.

What to do next

None of this is flashy. Most of it is just recovering income you have already worked hard to earn.

Make the mobile experience genuinely good, and design it to capture larger and regular gifts rather than assuming people will simply give less on a phone. Strip the form back to the fields you need. Offer the payment methods people actually use. Put regular giving front and centre. Match the page to the promise your ad or email made. Bring back the people who nearly finished. And above all, keep testing.

We spend real time and money getting people to the donation page, then leave the page itself untouched for years. There is no sense in attracting people if the page loses them at the end.

If you want an honest review of where your donation process is leaking income, and a practical plan to fix it, this is exactly the kind of work our digital and fundraising strategy helps with. Let's stop the leaks and turn more of your effort into results.

One practical note: if you don't have the capacity to run extensive testing in-house, a well-optimised, tested-out-of-the-box donation platform (such as Fundraise Up) can do some of this work for you. The cost is typically covered largely through optional donor "tips" or a small percentage of each gift, and the conversion uplift may outweigh the expense — though, as with everything above, it's worth testing against your own baseline rather than taking the vendor's word for it.

FAQs

Why do most charity donations still come from desktop, not mobile?

Because the gap is gift size, not conversion. In the M+R/Rally 2025 UK & Ireland benchmarks, mobile and desktop donation-page conversion were almost level (11% vs 12%), but the median mobile gift was £32 against £95 on desktop. People happily start on their phones — they just give smaller amounts, so more revenue lands on desktop.

How many fields should a charity donation form have?

As few as it takes to process the gift. Baymard Institute's checkout research finds most forms need only around 8 fields, yet the average has 11.3 — and every extra field is friction. Collect anything else, like address or how someone heard about you, after the donation is complete.

Should monthly giving be the default on a donation form?

It's worth testing, because the numbers favour it. Regular giving is 48% of UK & Ireland online revenue and still growing (up 8% in 2024), yet many forms still default to a one-off gift. Making monthly more prominent, or setting it as the default, often lifts regular-giving numbers — and a monthly supporter is worth more than a single cash gift within the first year.

What is a good donation page conversion rate?

UK & Ireland benchmarks put the main donation-page conversion rate at around 11–12%. But only about 2% of all website visitors donate at all, worth a median of £1.30 per visitor — so the biggest wins usually come from traffic quality and gift value, not just tweaking the form's conversion rate.