Recommendations from Dick McPherson, CEO, newdonorstrategies.com

When a listener wants to make a gift to a station, one of the greatest tragedies (from a fundraising perspective) is if the gift never happens because it's just too hard to get the money from the donor to you.

Completing a gift should be an effortless experience. And it's up to us, of course, to remove as many barriers as we can to make it so. 

Giving on a phone or tablet can be especially fraught. The gift conversion rate (percent of givers who succeed in making a gift once they've visiting your giving form) on mobile devices is half what it is on laptops. 

Aim to achieve at least a 25% conversion rate for giving via mobile devices. 

Ideally your mobile conversion rate should hit the average and be half of your desktop conversation rate. 

Here are four ways you can improve your mobile giving conversion rate:

1. Make sure your giving form is optimized for mobile. 

You've heard this before, but it's not just using a "phone-friendly" version of a long, complex online form. Your mobile form should not contain extensive premiums or requests for non-essential information. Instead, create a strictly mobile-optimized form, or use one from NPR Digital Services or another provider.

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2. Make sure your donate button appears at the top of every mobile page.

This includes the first page people see. Some “mobile-friendly” versions cause the donate button to disappear, but you can fix this. 

3. Rewrite the language on your mobile form so it's genuinely geared towards mobile.

Buttons should say “next” instead of “click here,” for example. Small things damage gift conversion rate.

4. Minimize or eliminate validation steps.

If you still have a “captcha” as part of the giving process, drop it. It reduces gift completion.