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What 101 News Donation Pages can tell you about your fundraising and membership program
Published 6 months ago • 6 min read
101 News Donation and Membership Pages
What we can learn from looking at how more than 100 news organizations are using donation forms, membership, premiums and user experience to grow reader revenue and build community.
Hello! This Future Community is an exciting one. Over the past couple months I've been researching the donation experience of over 100 US news organizations (and a few international ones). I'm thrilled to share findings and full summary, including data and screenshots, with Future Community subscribers.
Check it out and if you have questions or ideas I'd love to talk with you about the report, what we're seeing in donation and member experience, and strategies for improving, testing and growing donations, membership and reader revenue.
If job openings are your thing, we're sharing some great opportunities in the list below.
A look at Donation Pages report for Anthropocene.
Almost every news organization (and nonprofit) relies on online fundraising, membership and/or subscription campaigns.
The messaging and user experience for these campaigns is critical to their growth and success.
Busy news organizations creating donation and membership campaigns are usually operating in the dark. And have a lot of questions like:
Do premiums matter and how do we talk about them?
Where do we put a donate link?
Does the payment process involve one page or two, three or more?
Are there paragraphs of text and bullet points and premium offers alongside or before the donate form?
Should you talk about making a donation or membership?
What does membership mean?
The reality is that most news organizations are bound by the constraints of their donation form vendor. Organizations and companies like News Revenue Hub, Newspack, Wordpress, Lede and a handful of others are offering a lifeline to news organizations by handling the often convoluted and sometimes plain goofy details of form setup and donation processing.
This means that most news donation and membership flows look and work in similar ways.
Meanwhile organizations are left with picking colors, text, amounts, premiums and messaging options.
We thought it would be useful to surface examples of the donation flow and process so that news organizations and the folks who support them (fundraising strategists, designers, developers, tech providers, audience teams) can see what others are doing.
Going through these also provides some insights and maybe some surprises.
Looking ahead: Today, most news organizations rely on the inbox to reach supporters and present their content. Gmail, Apple and other email inbox providers will be applying AI to how they sort, summarize and present email. Having an established, engaged and (yes) financial relationship with a supporter will be critical to keeping eyeballs and attention.
How the donation, membership and subscription process works will evolve but always be critical to the business of news.
Learn more below about what we saw and what's in the report. Download a pdf version of the report here. This includes data and screenshots from all 101 organizations.
OBSERVATIONS
So much text
Spaces above and to the side of fundraising forms are often full of reasons to give, benefits and premiums for various levels of giving, testimonials, and even letters from editors explaining why they’re asking for support. If a user needs to scroll to find the donation form that they came to use then it’s likely too much text.
Membership programs are the exception.
There’s a lot of talk engaging news audiences as “members” who not just pay for news but who are part of shaping the organization, suggesting story ideas, providing direct feedback and coming to events with journalists and news creators.
I thought we’d see more of this than we did.
Most news orgs are asking for donations and support.
Donation asks are most often framed around supporting the future of news and/or the news organization. Some use premiums or benefits. Many do not.
For many, this feels like a “stage 1” in the reader revenue process. They’re putting a toe in the water and/or don’t need a lot of reader revenue but are happy for some extra cash.
Paywalls are rare. So is a clear story.
Only a handful of the news organizations we reviewed deploy some kind of paywall or registration wall. Great for access. But also puts all the revenue pressure on the organization’s fundraising and/or membership messaging and they manage the program. Note that we didn’t look at the New York Times, Washington Post or other legacy newspaper properties. We did sprinkle in a few smaller/regional legacy outlets like Salt Lake Tribune but, for the most part, these organizations aren’t using paywalls on their digital side.
On the other hand, if you're going to ask for support then be clear about the ask, present a clear value proposition, make giving easy to do and, when it comes time to seal the deal, don't get in your own way. Most news organizations are making their longest case for support on the donation page itself and hiding the donation form along the way.
Premiums should do no harm.
Benefits and premiums are the Wild West of the fundraising and membership forms we looked at. The most common premiums are content-based and most often include special newsletters but podcasts and special reports are offered. Many offer event tickets that may or may not include opportunities to meet staff.
A few organizations offer subscriptions to the NewYork Times (or just New York Times games). Others provide no advertisements or access to all articles (those with paywalls).
Most with premiums offer some kind of merchandise like hats, shirts, stickers, tote bags or socks (Sahan Journal). The most unique premium is offered by San Antonio Current: group hugs for anyone giving $10 or more a month.
It’s worth considering the pros and cons of premiums. Offers take up a lot of space on donation pages. Explaining the premiums available at different payment amounts can be confusing. And it’s debatable if premiums are getting attention, helping solidify the connection with supporters, attracting people interested in swag, sealing the deal on a donation or membership, or simply getting in the way of people interested in supporting their source of information and news.
101 Donation Pages
The report includes the following info for each organization we looked at:
Offer: do organizations pitch this as a donation, support, membership or something else?
Premiums: Do organizations offer merchandise, special content, ad-free experiences, events or other premiums at certain levels.
Donation Vendor or Host: The vendor that handles donation page setup and backend processing has a lot to do with the look, feel and user experience. In other words, vendors can play an outsized role in the success of a donation or membership program. To the extent possible we identify the tech vendor for each organization.
Notes: A few brief observations about the page and user experience. We're not evaluating success. We don't know how these programs are working overall. But 20 years of building, testing and dissecting online donation programs and forms leaves us with some thoughts on what to point out.
You'll also find screenshots of the main donation page viewed on desktop and mobile. The screenshots represent that most users see when landing on the page, not all of what's visible if you scroll down.
Hit reply or reach out on LinkedIn if you have questions about the report process, findings and insights -- or want to check out a deck with larger images.
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