Money in account – check; credit card in front of me – check; computer up and running – check; internet connection working – check; relevant website on my browser – check. I think I’m ready to make a couple of dozen online donations to a couple of dozen different charities.

“Generous one, that Andrea,” you say. In fact I do it twice a year. At the end of our Charity Media Monitor (CMM) survey, participating journalists can either claim an incentive or donate it to charity. It’s my job to make any donations on their behalf. Charities clearly need all the funds they can get, so why do some make it so difficult to give?

For the majority of charities, it's an easy task. The DONATE button is right in my face as I open the homepage and before I know it, the money’s with the charity, ready to be spent on a good cause.

However, things don’t always run so smoothly.

First of all, a handful of charities on my to-do list have websites that are so cluttered and disorganised that I cannot find the way to donations straight away. Now I realise this sounds a bit like a spoilt child type of complaint, but people (myself included) are lazy; by the time they’ve had to scroll up and down and up again, they’ve probably given up. What’s more, in a world where things are moving faster and faster, people want to be able to take in your homepage in 5 seconds. I know you can, but can I? Can others?

For another handful of charities on my to-do list, I can easily find the way to donations, but things fall flat soon after. For one charity, the donate button is dead. For another, I keep being re-directed to the homepage, going backwards rather than forwards. For yet another, a huge, daunting banner appears on my browser – YOUR DONATION HAS FAILED. I call them up and the lady on the phone calmly tells me the alarming fact that this happens all the time. All the time. How can any charity afford this to happen all the time?!

In line with my experiences, the Nielsen Norman Group found that it’s more difficult to give money away than it is to spend money buying things. The research had representative users visit a spectrum of non-profit and charity websites. On average, it took users in the study 7% more time to complete a donation process than it took them to complete an e-commerce checkout process in a separate usability study. This 7% discrepancy isn’t too bad, but it does demonstrate that charity website users’ experience lags behind that of commercial sites.

Despite my frustration and complaints, the above really isn’t about me. nfpSynergy has made a formal commitment to make these donations on behalf of journalists participating in our research and so I will make them happen – and I did, eventually. 

It’s about the majority of donors - those who donate on their own behalf, out of personal generosity. Our CAM data shows 23% of respondents have visited a charity’s website in the past 3 months and 23% of those did so to donate. That’s a substantial number of people who shouldn’t be discouraged to give because of broken links, confusing websites and failed transactions.

Dear charities with unclear, rocky donation procedures (you know who you are),

Get your act together.

• Simplify; no one has ever complained your homepage isn't complex enough
• Make it work. It's worth it (every pound committed to improving your website's usability returns £10 to £100) (Source: IBM) 
• Don't miss out, it's completely unnecessary (and an utter shame).

Does this hit the back of the Net? Or is it pushing all the wrong buttons? Leave us a comment below.