Welcome to today's Tech Circle. We are gonna talk about how to build better online forms. This is an really important but often overlooked skill, and, I'm actually this is something that I love, and I'm really looking forward to talking about it with you today. Quick question for you. How do you feel about your current online forms? Drop a note in the chat. Let me know where you feel like, are your forms just killing it? You're getting amazing conversion rates. Everything's awesome. You could probably be teaching this. Or do you look at your forms and think, ew, David. Yes. Emily. Okay. As I'm talking to you, I'm gonna I'm gonna show you some examples, and it's important to note that all of the examples come from Neon One's platform. However, all of the best practices. I'm gonna share with you today are applicable to every platform. So keep that in mind if you're not using, Neon One or our forms.. They're pretty whatever. If that isn't the most, like,. I feel that in my bones. I feel that in my bones. Okay. This checklist is gonna help if you are setting up any kind of form and optimizing it. I'm gonna drop a note in the chat. So if you don't have your phone handy or if you would rather have it on your desktop, you can look at it that way. This is something, that you can just keep handy or give some to someone else on your team who are building forms for you. If you are giving or feeling ew, David, when you look at your forms, this this can this can help. A question that I often get when I am talking to oh, I sent it to hosts and panelists, not to everyone. A question that I often get when I'm talking about donation form optimization is, is this actually really important? Like, don't people who land on a form already have in their heads that they're gonna fill it out? And the answer is, no, not really. And, yes, this is actually really important because it's really important because it's very easy to think that everyone who lands on your form, whether it's a donation form or a form that they're gonna use to buy a membership, it's really or anything else. It's really easy to assume that people who land on the form are gonna fill it out regardless of what it looks like and regardless of what the process is like. Unfortunately, we know that that's not the case. In twenty twenty, M and R Benchmarks put out a a study that found that around eighty percent of folks who land on a donation form, this is specific to donation forms, are not gonna make a gift. Other forms probably have similar conversion rates. It's gonna vary. So, like, a a membership reenrollment form is probably gonna have a different, conversion rate than a basic membership form. Event registration form that you send out in a specific email targeted to people who are interested in your events, it's gonna have a different conversion rate than an event form you share to social media. But the takeaway here is that not everyone who lands on a donation form, a membership form, any kind of form is actually gonna fill it out. And as much as it hurts my heart to say this, it is nearly impossible to have a form that is going to have a hundred percent conversion rate. It's almost impossible to build a form that inspires every single person who lands on that page to fill it out. But you can improve your conversion rates by making sure that you take a couple of steps to reinforce someone's instinct to get involved with your organization, and then make the process of getting involved really easy to complete. So today, I'm gonna share some tips that will kind of help you do that. Before we get into it, though, it is really important to understand why people don't complete forms that they land on. There's, of course, there's always gonna be a percentage of people who land on a form that you have shared because they are simply looking to check you out. If you post, an update on Facebook and you include a link to your donation form, people may click on it and land on it because it's the fastest way for them to get to your website. They want to learn a little more about you. It's easiest for them to get to your donation form in that moment. Maybe they're getting a feel for your work. If you're sharing, a volunteer form, like, maybe they're looking for a little more information about volunteer opportunities before they actually decide to get involved. Whatever it is, you're gonna have people evaluating you and deciding whether or not they actually want to get involved with the opportunities you shared with them, and they're not necessarily sure that they should. And we're gonna look at how you can address some of those issues here in a minute. Other big reasons that people don't fill out forms frequently have more to do with the forms themselves. So if you've got a form that is really long or really complicated, you're probably gonna get low conversion rates. Forms that are frustrating to use, if you have a form that doesn't work really well on mobile devices, for example, we'll get lower lower conversions. Then that makes sense. Right? The folks don't have to fill them out. My the example I often use, my electric company's online form stinks. It's terrible, but I have to fill it out. They're gonna shut off my electricity if I don't. People people don't have to fill out your forms. If the process isn't a good experience for them, they'll choose to just delay it, or they'll decide they're not gonna get involved at all. But luckily, there are some really straightforward steps you can take to make your forms feel less like My Electric Company's forms and more like a a form that someone is completing in a a nice, easy, straightforward way. Alright. First, we're gonna look at some design elements. And I'm talking more specifically about pages here instead of the forms themselves. Now to be clear, you may have forms that don't necessarily require their own page. A really common one do you all have, newsletter sign up forms that you just, like, embed all over your your your site or little things that you only are collecting maybe one or two fields? Those those smaller forms are not what we're gonna talk about here as much. So I'm not talking about newsletter sign ups or, like, simple interest forms where people just give you one or two fields. I'm gonna be talking about longer forms that people use to make donations, to enroll as a member, to event to register for an event, to sign up to volunteer, things like that. So keep that in mind.. Now this is an example. I know how many of you are using donation forms? Let me know. And how many of you are using, like, membership forms, volunteer forms? What kind of forms are you are you doing? For this example, donation forms, mostly donation forms. Okay. Okay. Good. Donation form mall oh, Ann Marie's doing it all. Okay. We're I'm gonna I this is an example for a donation form specifically. I'm gonna show you examples for memberships, events, and volunteers later on. But, for this example,. I've got a donation page. Some of these best practices are really gonna apply to any kind of online form you're using. So couple things to notice.. The navigation is gone. I'll talk about this a little more in a minute, but the reason we've removed the navigation from this is because, we want to remove opportunities for someone to get distracted while they're filling out a form. So, if you choose to do this with your own forms, which I do recommend for especially for some of the forms that y'all are talking about in the chat, You can add those navigation items back on your confirmation page removing external links. Some people even choose to delete their footers. Really just keeps people focused on the the task at hand, which is filling out this form. There is content on the form here that reiterates why someone may want to get involved with this nonprofit. In this case, it's making a case for support, a case for donations. And this impact statement explains exactly what a gift will do. I've reiterated that impact statement and that messaging over here on, on the donation form itself. I've included suggested donation amounts with descriptions, and there's a picture too. And this really helps someone who lands on this page understand or visualize who their gift is gonna support. I have a Google form for volunteers. I hope to add a donor form for other people outside our organization. Stephanie, a lot so Stephanie in the chat is asking if there are templates for donations, etcetera. Depending on the the platform that you're using, there may be templates. Yes. So most online fundraising tools will either give you templates or they will walk you through the process of setting up an online donation form. If you're using something like. Google Forms for volunteers, you may have a little bit you may have some a little less, control over the design elements here. Okay. So this is, this is an example of a form. We're gonna go into some specifics later. However you choose to design the page that houses your form, you're gonna wanna focus on showing your audience that they are in a place where they have the opportunity to get involved with your work and make a difference in your community. So your page and your form are gonna vary from person to person. Of course, your approach to, getting someone to donate is gonna be a little different than the approach than or the approach that you'll take to get someone to register for an event. The information you share about volunteering is gonna be different than the information you would share if you were trying to get people to purchase a membership. But these goals are gonna be the same for any form that you create. You're gonna show people that they're in the right place. You're gonna reaffirm their decision to get involved with your work. You're gonna give them some information that will help them decide if they want to get involved, and you're gonna show them information that will help them understand the impact they're going to make when they when they get involved with your work. Doran asked a really great question. If you remove navigation, don't you risk frustrating a visitor who wants to exit? Possibly. And some people choose not to remove navigation. This may be a better, a better tactic for, say, a form that you send to people, maybe through an email, that is tied to a specific campaign or ask. Some folks choose to remove navigation on the the form that lives on their website. Others choose to remove navigation only for specific forms. I don't worry too hard about frustrating people who wants who want to exit because they can just hit the back button and go go back to the previous page. So it's up to you. Some people do it. Some people don't. I've seen that work very well for organizations. So if you experiment with it, see see what happens. Alright. So we've touched on some design elements. We've talked about adding impact statements and imagery and and other elements that help people understand where they are, how you want them to get involved, and what will happen when they actually do get involved. So let's look at the forms themselves because this is where things get kinda neat. Alright. So for some forms, event registration forms, membership forms, donation forms, all kinds of forms, there are some universal best practices. Your form or at least the page it's on should always make use of your organization's color schemes, your imagery, your fonts, even, your logo certainly, and other brand elements that that show people, again, that they're in the right place. This signals to people that they're in in a good location. So, I'll share an example of what I mean here because it's hard to explain. A while ago, I went to go make a donation to an organization that I have donated to in the past. They had switched, processors. They were using a different platform to run their Giving Tuesday campaign, and I landed on a donation form that didn't have their logo on it. It didn't look like the rest of their website. It didn't look like other donation forms of theirs that I had made gifts on, and I was kind of leery about actually making a gift on that form. It didn't look like them. It didn't sound like them. It didn't feel like their website, and it wasn't anything like my past donation experiences. So when you put together a form that looks and feels like the rest of your website, you're making people feel safe and you're telling them, like, you're giving yes. You're in the right place. You're supporting the right nonprofit. It gives them a much better, more, smooth donation experience. So keep that in mind. While you're actually setting up your form, include as few fields as you can get away with. An example, if you want to know how someone landed on your donation form, if you've if you've set up a donation form and you wanna know, like, what inspired you to give today, you can maybe add that, but I would think really hard about adding that that field. I found in my twelve plus years in the nonprofit space that adding even one or two additional fields can have a negative impact on your conversion rate. Now you may decide that that's worth it, but you really wanna think carefully about the number of fields that you include on your form and if the information you are looking to collect is really necessary. If you'd I would suggest this. If you really want to learn more about the people who are donating or buying memberships or registering for events, try following up with a survey after the fact to get more information about who they are, what motivates them, what link got them on your page that day. That can be a really great way for you both to collect information about your supporters and give them an experience that makes getting involved very fast, very easy, and very smooth. While you're doing this, you can do something else to to make the process easier and more enjoyable. Divide your form into multiple sections. You have someone commit upfront. They choose a donation amount.. They choose a membership tier. They select the event package they want and then collect personal and payment information on subsequent screens. This is, something you it's called a multi step form, and this can improve your conversion rates by creating something called cognitive momentum. Cognitive momentum is the idea that, like, you've taken the biggest step, you've taken the hardest step, you've committed to getting involved. Everything else is just kind of a formality. What is what impedes cognitive momentum? What makes it harder for someone to commit to filling out a form is when they see everything that you're gonna ask for upfront. Let's go back to my electric company's form, for example. I have to enter all of my information all in one long screen. It's intimidating looking. It's a drag. I think a lot about what I have to do. I have to slog my way through these thirty different fields or whatever it is. It makes it hard to be excited about completing the process. Splitting your splitting your form into multiple steps doesn't necessarily make your form shorter, but it makes it feel shorter, and that can improve your conversion rates. So these are universal best practices. And now I wanna look at some useful practices and tactics for different types of forms. And I think there are at least a couple of you who are doing all of these different things. So let's look at donation pages first. If you're building a donation page, I would really encourage you to include a few things. The first thing that I would really encourage you to include on a donation form is suggested donation amount. So that's these over here, twenty five, fifty, a hundred dollars, etcetera. When you're doing that, please, please, please always include the opportunity to give your own amount. If so this works for a couple of different reasons. One, this often encourages people to upgrade their gift a little bit. If I land on this form intending to give twenty dollars there's a pretty high likelihood that I see that I can donate to a scholarship fund for twenty five dollars and I may choose just to do that. It's not a big leap for me to give five dollars more. I may choose to do that because. I see the suggestion here. But if I truly only want to give twenty dollars I should also be able to do that. So please leave this other amount option here. One of the reasons that this is helpful is because it helps people avoid something called decision fatigue. Are you familiar, with decision fatigue? Let me know. And while you let me know, yes. The slides will be available after the webinar, and I will send them to you, tomorrow morning. You'll get a a link to the slides, a link to the recording, and a link to the checklist, that I included. Okay. I see some nos in here. I have decision fatigue every day. Kate, you and me, we're on the same page. Alright. Decision fatigue is the feeling of not being able to choose because you have too many options or the decision of being so tired from making all of the decisions that we all make every day that is making another decision sit feels impossible. So I'll give you an example. I went to the grocery store a while ago. I needed toothpaste. I use a specific kind of toothpaste. I only get that kind of toothpaste. I got to the grocery store.. They didn't have my toothpaste. They had approximately two hundred other kinds of toothpaste. I was it was the end of the day. It'd been a long day. I was staring at my two hundred toothpaste options, and that my brain would not make a decision. And I left the grocery store without buying toothpaste. That feeling of not being able to choose because you have too many options is an example of decision fatigue. Some of you called it out here. It's like being asked where do you want to go to dinner. There are too many options. I do not know what. I want for dinner. Choosing is hard. However, if you said, hey, Abby. Would you like to go to this place, this place, or this place? Choosing is much easier. I don't have endless options. I have three options. Having a handful of options can make a decision easier, and impact statements like this can make it even easier. So here, someone lands on this page and you say, how much would you like to donate? They have endless options. They could donate any amount. Here, you're giving people a handful of options, and you're telling them what those options will make possible. So that's why I really encourage you to include options, and this is gonna be a theme in this in this presentation. I would also encourage you to give people the option of making a recurring or a monthly gift. I could keep you here all day talking about why that's so important and how amazing monthly donors are. I won't do that. I will tell you that recurring donors are phenomenal supporters to have in your base, and it is an increasingly popular way for people to support their favorite nonprofits. So please in in please allow people to to make recurring gifts. Jeff is cracking me up in the chat. I have decision fatigue listening to my partner trying to decide what to order for dinner. Yes. My final suggestion here is that you include the ability for donors to offset their processing fees. Now I've encountered a lot of folks in the nonprofit space who are really reluctant to include the opportunity to add a little bit to their to their, donation to offset those fees. I have, in the past, found that donors are very willing to do that if they are given the option. I've even talked to one organization that said that between eighty and ninety percent of their donors choose to make that little additional gift. Now if you don't wanna include it, that's okay. But I will say that adding the option to leave that, to leave that there is useful. Nothing bad is gonna happen. If a donor chooses not to make that additional gift, nothing it won't be a bad experience for them. You may be surprised at how many of your how many supporters choose to to offset their fees. Alright. Let's talk about membership pages. Membership enrollment forms follow a lot of really similar best practices. Offering different membership levels can be a great way to boost involvement. That's not necessarily perfect for every single membership association. Some professional associations only have, for example, one or two options. But if you if you can offer different membership levels, try it out. Especially this is especially useful if you explain any perks or benefits that go along with each individual tier. So this is another example of helping people, avoid decision fatigue. I can choose which kind of membership level I want. There are there's information available to me about what's included in each tier. It's easier for me to decide. I would also encourage you if you have the ability to do so. I would encourage you to give people the option of auto renewing their membership. This can be a great way to reduce membership churn. It's a nice way for people like me, who I set up auto renew every time I get a membership. It's a nice way to get your members, enrolled in a way that they are they're actively choosing to do it. You're not automatically including them in auto renew, But it's a nice way to make sure that they don't miss out on the perks and benefits of their membership. I am sure you'll be shocked to hear that some of the best practices apply in a way to event registration forms also. If it is appropriate for you and your event, offer some different ticket types, and then be clear about what is included with each type. You're probably noticing a pattern. This is another great way to help prevent decision fatigue. This is something that's important. I would also really recommend on your form itself, I would recommend you include location information like I have over here. Letting people know where an event is taking place is a really important part of helping them decide whether or not they want to attend. So here's an example. The other day, I got an an invitation from a nonprofit that I donate to inviting me to attend an event at a brewery and listen to a lecture. I'm not familiar with the brewery. I don't know where it is. I couldn't find any information about where the brewery was located until I had already chosen a ticket and was getting ready to enter my payment information. The brewery was on the other side of the state, and I didn't want to drive four hours on a weeknight to go attend a lecture. So provide that information upfront. It is a great way for you to give your your supporters a better experience. You're helping them decide and make an educated decision about whether or not they want to attend your event. Some of the themes are very similar on volunteer pages. Now I want to make clear. So some folks I see put together just very basic volunteer interest forms where you basically ask people, like, would you like to learn about our upcoming volunteer opportunities? And most of the time those forms are limited to like maybe a first and last name and an email address something very simple. The impact statements note here it's valuable for every kind of volunteer form even those very high level very entry level interest forms other forms like this one that. I have here are a little more in-depth you're going into specific volunteer opportunities where you are sharing very pointed specific jobs and opportunities that need to be done. Here, I would include some different volunteer options if you have them. I would also include some specific volunteering details here. What's the job? When is it happening, and where is it happening? Those are all pieces of information that your supporters are going to need to make an informed decision about whether or not they actually want to get involved. In this image, for example,. I have two opportunities. I can either work in the native plant garden or I can work on the nature trail cleanup. I know exactly what it's going to entail. I know exactly where it is, and I can make a good choice about whether or not I'm available and willing to get there or I'm willing to do that work. This is tremendously helpful for your volunteer coordinators in particular. It would be a real pain if you had an influx of people registering for the native plant garden and then discovering that, they can't actually make it on Tuesdays and Thursdays from eleven to two PM. So if and I will say this, if you're not sure what information would be helpful to your volunteers, try asking some volunteers themselves and ask them what would be most helpful to them as they make the decision to get involved. They will be really great kind of a there'll be a great litmus test for your form. Alright. Anytime you are collecting information, particularly if you are collecting payment information, or very personal information, I would encourage you to take some steps to put your supporters at ease as they're filling out your form. Some very basic pieces that you can do. One, it's not included in the screenshot here. Make sure that your form is encrypted. The best way you can do that is to look up at the URL of the page that your form is on and make sure it starts with the prefix HTTPS. That I look for that when I am filling out personal information. I wanna know that my data is safe, and that tells me that that's encrypted. Other things you can do, I do have down here, there is a data privacy and consent link. There is a privacy policy linked here where I can see, if I am curious, how you're going to use my information if I fill out your form. And then this is really most appropriate for areas where people are giving you their credit card information. This little padlock icon is a small detail, but people do look for it. And including these little security indicators on your form can really have a positive impact on your overall conversion rates. And even if even if. I land on this form, say it's a volunteer form, I'm not giving you my payment information, but I'm giving you my contact information. Simply seeing that you have a privacy policy, even if I don't click it to read it, makes me it signals to me that you care and you are taking care of my my data, and you're gonna keep it safe. Alright. This is a bonus section. I'm gonna go through it really quickly because we're almost at time, but this is important. Your form, when you set up your form, is put together to make it quick and easy and pleasurable for someone to get involved in supporting your work. You can really make the most of that experience with some thoughtful follow-up, follow-up communications. This is because of something called the peak end rule, where, put simply, people remember a an experience and their impression of it based on how they feel at the the peak of the activity, so actually filling out the form, and then after the activity at the end. So whether you are sending a donation confirmation letter with a receipt or a an event registration confirmation with event details or a thank you, like, we're gonna be in touch with you about your membership or your volunteer sign up. Send them send them an email and make it nice. Have them land on a nice confirmation page and then send a receipt or an email with, like, next steps, especially for those volunteers that thank people for their interest, thank people for getting involved, and let them know what's gonna happen next. Again, this is especially true with event registrations. You may wanna tell them where the event is, give them some reminders, tell them dress code or parking situations or whatever it is. Thank your volunteers. Thank them for signing up. Let them know who to contact with questions. Make them feel good about what they've just done, and then give them next steps. And in the last minute that we have together, I'm gonna tell you the single best way to test a form. All of these best practices can be a little overwhelming. No two forms are identical, and, honestly, there are exceptions to every rule. So if you put together a donation form, a membership enrollment form, a volunteer interest form, event registration form, whatever kind of form, This is the way to test it and make sure that it works. Sit down with someone who does not work for your organization, probably maybe not even someone that's related to you. Have them go through your form, ask them to make a donation, sign up for your event, do whatever it is. And then one, ask them to share if they get stuck, if they get frustrated, if something is confusing, but also watch them while they do it. This is the single best way that you can get a feel for how real life people who are not familiar with your organization are going to interact with your form. And once you kind of observe where they get stuck, where they get frustrated, if they tell you that there are too many fields that aren't really necessary, you can go back and amend your form, tweak it, see how it performs, and then continue to iterate on those those updates in the future. Ruthie, yes. Do this. My ninety three year old mother would be perfect for this. That is exactly that is exactly the kind of person that you wanna have test your form. You wanna have someone who does not work for you, probably not very, like, very familiar with what an online form should be like. Have them do it. Just watch just watch what happens. I love that. The ninety three year old mother would be perfect. Everyone borrow Ruthie's ninety three year old mother. Alright. I covered a lot of information in a very short period of time, so I wanna make sure that there are some there are some time to answer questions. Let's see. We would prefer not to have our constituents select the membership. As far as I can tell, Neon forms don't allow the membership to be hidden like on surveys. Am I missing something? Jean, I would actually like to learn a little more about that. And you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna stop sharing my screen because I'm gonna look something up for you. What I would encourage you to do is follow the link that I'm about to drop in the chat. We have open office hours where you can ask specific questions about the forms and activities that you are supporting with, neon neon one. And I'm gonna drop a link in the chat to everyone if Zoom will cooperate. This is a calendar that we have. And, actually, at four PM today, there is the opportune I'm just gonna share my screen. There is an opportunity today to attend an event that, is an open office hours specifically for this, this topic. So at four PM, there is an opportunity for you to jump in and ask us these questions. Membership forms are a little bit of a different beast, and there may be ways for you to come up either with a form where the the membership tier or opportunity is hidden or, come up with a workaround for that. Let's see. We would like to customize the credit card processing fee message so that it doesn't have our organization name, but the campaign name. I don't see a way to customize that message. Amy, are you also using, a Neon One form? If you are, I would encourage you also to jump into this office hour at four. They can help you figure out how specifically to, to customize that message if there is a way to do so. I would say that especially with, options like customizing language around transaction details like that, there may be legal reasons that you can't update that particular language. There are some rules around how you can present, present some payment options to be in line with, like, state and federal law. So, I would I would check into that. Is there a way to have a recurring tab like the donation page you had, but for installment memberships? Anne Marie, I'm not positive. I'm not positive with that mostly because I've I'm not familiar with the idea of a of installment memberships. Would you let me know which slide you're referencing? Are you talking about the slide for memberships themselves? Because I can absolutely put that up. The donate okay. Let's see. I'll get that back up here. Hi, Joe. Interview. Can you guys still see my screen, or are you seeing the old one? I wanna make sure I'm showing you the right right thing. Nyan allows installment membership similar to recurring donations. Okay. Good. In that case, again so I'm I'm honestly most familiar with the donation form side of things. If you if they if we allow installment memberships sorry for membership. Okay. It's where we are here. If we allow those installment memberships, there must be a way to make that an option, but I am not familiar with that right off the top of my head. Again, I would jump into the, the training today, or I would oh, good. Jessica, I also have that question for membership. I RSVP'd for the office hours today. Fantastic. I'm gonna drop a note in the chat. If if you go to academy dot neon one dot com, you can check out not I mean, we have documentation in there, but we also have some courses on how you can set things up for your membership constituents, your donation your donation forms. I would check that out. And now I'm kind of curious. I'm I've never encountered installation memberships, and I'd like to know more about them. It sounds like the idea is is this so someone, like, splits a membership fee into smaller pieces, or is it, like, a monthly membership, opportunity? Okay. I have installation set up. It makes the form really full and clunky. Yeah. I would I would drop in there, and, one, check out the open office hours. But, also, we do have a suggestions portal, that I can make sure I find a link for you for. The suggestions portal is where y'all can tell us, like, if you're encountering something that you really want to do and it's not working out the way you'd like, you can drop a note in the suggestions portal, and we kind of track those, and we use your suggestions to guide our product roadmap. So as we are working on the membership module and we see that you really like the installation setup, but it makes the form a little clunky, let us know about it. And we track all of the suggestions and include that in our in our road map planning. Okay. I think I've gotten most of the answers. You all have been very gracious with your time. And, I would like to remind you again, if you're a Neon one user, please check out those open office hours. Even if you don't go to the one today, we have them regularly, and you can always drop in and ask questions. So if you if you don't have time to go in at four today, that's okay. Join another session.. We can help you out. I'm gonna be in touch with you tomorrow morning. I'm gonna send you a link to the recording, the slides, the transcripts, and the checklist. So if you didn't grab that, you'll get it tomorrow. Keep an eye out for an email from me. Thank you all so much for being here. I know that this is a busy time of year. You guys are doing a lot.. Your jobs are are wild. You're wearing a lot of hats, and I appreciate you hanging out with me today. Alright. I will be in touch.. Y'all have a good one. Oh my gosh.