A +41.42% reduction in donation drop-off rate for MAF

The Brief

Our Paid Media team has been supporting Mission Aviation Fellowship drive strong traffic and conversions. A key learning that was passed on to the Website Optimisation team was that their campaigns struggled with a 71% drop-off rate during the donation process. Their question was:

“How can we reduce drop-offs and improve the donation user journey?”

The Approach

1. Understanding Technical and Behavioural Patterns

We began by investigating technical and behavioural data to understand where users struggled and what is happening per step of the donation flow. our two methods:

• UX Heuristic Audit: Our expert review of the donation flow highlighted issues such as slow page load times per step and technical errors caused by problematic code handling.
• GA4 Behaviour Analysis: We mapped data from GA4 to the donation flow, identifying key drop-off points and correlating them with the technical challenges uncovered during the audit.

2. Understanding User Needs

To answer the “why” behind the drop-offs, we gathered qualitative insights directly from users and teams that would be handling the errors:

• Customer Service Feedback: Speaking with customer service teams revealed that many users experienced timeout errors due to slow processing which led them to call up and make sure their donation was processed (A bonus: this also led to a lot of first-time donor frustration!)
• User Testing: We tested the donation process against MAF’s audience personas, gathering insights on the donation steps, the feelings and emotional state when donating, the barriers with the fields, and areas for simplification. This feedback informed clear opportunities for experimentation and improvement.

3. Implementing and Measuring Changes

We partnered with MAF’s development team to roll out enhancements, ensuring tracking was in place to measure impact accurately. Key changes we’re bucketed into 3 key areas:

Improve technical performance:

• Improve load speed – There was unnecessary code loading per step that buffered the load
• Ensure that API’s across the payment steps are up to date – An important step in the donation flow is the donation payment step, it’s important that the payment methods are kept up to date and the API’s are connecting well against your chosen gateways/CRM.

Improve the UX flow for users:

• Remove all distractions – Isolate the donation funnel when the user enters the begin_donation – We recommended removing ALL distractions when a user enters the flow, we have evidence from previous experiments we’ve ran across other charities that fed into what is a ‘good’ persuasion vs what is a ‘bad’ persuasion.
• Simplify the journey – We provided actions to simplify the number of fields being requested to make it easier for the user to proceed. As well as this, we recommend making the journey to donation as clear as possible using clever UI Design.
  A/B Testing – Consider testing different variations of the donation journey funnel to see which is best suited for MAF’s audience group.

Fix all the bugs and issues we found along the way:

It’s common to find bugs and issues along the way when we’re conducting our optimisation projects. We passed these on to the development team with clear instructions and actions.

The Results

The changes had an immediate and significant impact:

• +41.42% reduction in drop-off rate
• A +79.82% increase in donations

*These results are based on a before vs after analysis, focused on understanding the additional performance a new feature has generated using Arkyard’s forecasting calculator tool.

We are also now running a donation experiment test to keep pushing for improvements – Watch this space!