Everything upstream ends here. The campaign, the email, the search result, the poster with the QR code – all of it delivers someone to one page, and what that page asks of them decides whether the money arrives.
Most small charity donation pages lose people for reasons that have nothing to do with generosity. Too many questions, an amount that doesn’t fit, a form that fights a phone, or nothing on the page that tells a stranger you’re real.
If your donation page came with a platform and nobody has looked at it since, that’s worth an hour of someone’s attention – and it’s the kind of thing our digital and tech support does.
Find out what you’re losing first
Before changing anything, get one number: of the people who start a donation, what proportion finish?
Most donation platforms or systems will tell you. If yours won’t, that’s worth knowing too. The figure is almost always lower than people expect, and it is the only measure that tells you whether the page is the problem.
Look at it split by mobile and desktop. A gap between the two is the clearest diagnostic you’ll get, and it usually points at form length rather than design.
Ask for less
Every field is a chance to stop. The test for each one is simple: can we take the donation without this?
You need an amount, a card, and an email address to send a receipt. You need a name and home address only if the donor is making a Gift Aid declaration, and even then the address is required for that purpose rather than yours.
Phone numbers, titles, “how did you hear about us”, and marketing preference questions presented as compulsory all cost donations. If the database wants them, the database is asking at the wrong moment. Anything not needed to process the gift can be asked afterwards, in the thank-you email, of someone who has already given.
Get the amounts right for your donors
Suggested amounts do most of the work on a donation page, and they are usually copied from charities with a very different supporter base.
Set them from your own data. Look at what people actually give you, and place your suggestions around that – not at what you wish they gave. Pre-selecting a middle option helps; pre-selecting your highest one reads as pressure. Always leave a free-entry field, because the person who wanted to give £7 will otherwise give nothing.
Where you attach a description to an amount – what £25 does – it has to be accurate and defensible. An impact figure you can’t explain if challenged is worse than no figure at all.
Offer monthly properly
A single-gift page with monthly giving hidden behind a small link converts almost nobody to regular giving. Put the two options side by side and let people choose.
Regular giving is what stabilises small charity income, and the case for building it is in recurring donations. The page is where it’s won or lost.
Not sure whether your page or your traffic is the problem?
Charities usually assume they need more visitors when the page in front of them is losing half the people already arriving. A free Charity Consultation will help you work out which one to fix.
Capture Gift Aid so the claim survives
A tick box saying “add Gift Aid” is not a declaration.
HMRC requires the donor’s full name and home address, your charity named, the gifts identified, and confirmation they’re to be treated as Gift Aid donations. Alongside that, the donor has to be given a clear explanation that they must have paid enough Income Tax or Capital Gains Tax to cover what will be reclaimed. The full requirements are in how Gift Aid works.
Two things to check on your own page. The box must not be pre-ticked, because a declaration is something the donor makes rather than something you assume. And the explanatory wording has to be visible rather than folded behind a link nobody opens.
Gift Aid capture rate is worth tracking as its own number. A page where only a third of eligible donors tick the box is leaving 25% of that third’s value behind.
Build it for a phone
Assume one hand, a moving train, and patchy signal.
Tap targets large enough to hit without aiming. Fields that trigger the right keyboard, so the number pad appears for card entry. Autofill left working rather than blocked. Digital wallet options where your provider supports them, because they remove the typing entirely and that is where mobile donations are lost.
Then test it yourself, on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office Wi-Fi, from the same link a supporter would follow. Most people who do this find something.
Accessibility belongs here too – contrast, keyboard navigation, labels that screen readers can read. The duty and the standard are covered in digital foundations.
Give a stranger a reason to trust you
Someone who found you through a search has no history with you. On the page they need: your charity’s full name and registered number, a plain sentence about what the money does, a visible indication the payment is secure, and a way to contact a human.
None of this is decoration. It is the difference between a page that looks like a charity and a page that looks like a form someone put on the internet.
Fees, and the honest way to handle them
Every payment route costs something. Card processing, platform charges, or both.
Offering donors the option to cover the fee is reasonable, and many will. Presenting it as a default they have to notice and remove is not, and it’s the sort of thing that damages trust when someone spots it on their statement.
Don’t build your own donation form to avoid fees. Handling card details yourself brings security obligations you do not want, and a well-run provider’s page will convert better than anything built in-house. The trade-offs between providers are in fundraising platforms.
While you’re there: never accept card details by email, over the phone into a notebook, or in a form that stores them anywhere you control.
Marketing permission is a separate question
This is where donation pages most often get data protection wrong, and the rules changed recently.
Processing the donation itself doesn’t need consent; you’re performing a transaction the donor asked for. Sending them fundraising emails afterwards is governed by PECR rather than UK GDPR alone, and PECR has historically required consent.
Since 5 February 2026, there is another route. The charitable purpose soft opt-in lets a charity send marketing emails and texts without prior consent where the sole purpose is furthering its charitable purposes, the contact details were obtained when the person expressed interest in those purposes or offered support for them, and a simple opt-out is given both at the point of collection and in every message afterwards. A donation page is squarely that moment.
Two things follow for the page itself. You still need something visible at the point of collection; either a clear opt-out or a plain unticked consent box, depending on which route you are relying on. And the route is not retrospective, so details collected before February 2026 do not qualify and stay under the old consent rules.
Consent remains available and is the cleaner basis where you want one list under one rule. Whichever you choose, decide it deliberately rather than inheriting whatever your platform’s default form does; and check the position against the ICO’s updated direct marketing guidance, published in April 2026. Getting this right is what makes email marketing possible later.
What to change first
Four numbers tell you nearly everything: completion rate, the mobile and desktop split, average gift, and Gift Aid capture rate.
Change one thing at a time and give it long enough to mean something – a small charity’s traffic won’t produce a fast answer, and changing three things at once tells you nothing about which worked.
The order that usually pays: remove fields, then fix the amounts, then fix mobile, then fix the Gift Aid capture.
And remember the page is one step. What arrives in the next hour decides whether that donor ever gives again, which is covered in what to fix first in digital fundraising.
If the wider question is where donations should be coming from at all, that belongs in your fundraising strategy.
