Why Digital User Experience Matters in Higher Ed Fundraising
Universities, colleges, and other higher education institutions offer valuable opportunities for students to hone their skills, create pathways to dream careers, network with peers, and create unforgettable memories. However, whether it’s for current students or alumni, these tasks cost money. In order to provide these experiences, donations from alumni and other supporters are critical.
Even before a global pandemic most processes and engagements, modern higher ed fundraising thrived online. People can visit a school website, peruse upcoming events or noteworthy research accomplishments, and give a gift — all from the internet! In fact, your website is likely the first place alumni, students, educators, and families look in order to learn more about your institution and take action to support it.
That’s why a focus on digital user experience (UX) is essential if you want to attract more donors and increase funding for your higher ed institution.
This guide is written to ensure that your own higher ed fundraising strategy is prioritizing digital user experience. It will answer the following questions:
What is digital UX?
What are the benefits of good UX for higher ed fundraising?
What are the UX best practices to follow?
A focus on your higher ed UX isn’t just beneficial for fundraising efforts, it can even help attract prospective students or ensure your website serves as a reliable resource for current students. Ready to dive in? Let’s begin with an overview of the digital user experience.
1. What is digital UX?
Digital user experience describes how users feel and interact when they engage with an organization’s online content. For higher ed fundraising efforts, your website and online donation page will be your biggest digital UX priorities.
To better understand this, let’s put ourselves in the donor’s shoes. According to Kanopi’s article on the donor journey, donors will usually do some research before giving a gift. This research often consists of going to their favorite search engine and finding the organization’s website.
Imagine this: An alumnus is interested in catching up with their alma mater. They remember how impactful and meaningful their study abroad experience was and want to donate to help fund this program for future students.
However, the information for the program is hard to find. Plus, the online donation page is cluttered with large blocks of texts, making it difficult to locate exactly which fields need to be filled out. In the end, the alumnus clicks out and forgets about giving altogether.
The above is an example of bad digital UX and even caused the school to miss out on a valuable funding opportunity. In order to not only inspire gifts but ensure that any visitor who wants to donate can, streamlined UX is critical.
2. What are the benefits of good UX for higher ed fundraising?
A focus on user experience for your higher ed institution can do much more than making it easy for supporters who want to give.
This is because your higher ed website has to meet the needs of many different audiences. This includes current students, prospective students, alumni, educators/staff, families, researchers, and other supporters of your institution’s work. As soon as a user lands on your higher ed website, it shouldn’t be hard to find the content or complete the action they’re looking for.
Here are the benefits that good UX can bring to your higher ed institution:
Positive relationships between supporters and your higher ed organization. The more positive the experience that users have on your website, the more they’ll consider your higher ed organization as reliable and worthwhile. Plus, becoming a thought leader in the education space can only help your various fundraising efforts.
Lower development costs down the line when you invest in UX upfront. A common mistake that website creators make is not making UX a top priority— this can create a need for additional investments in tools and site development projects just to ensure that your site is working properly and serving visitor needs. Investing in UX upfront can make all the difference in the lifespan of your site. And, it takes way less time to optimize good UX than to continuously fix bad UX.
Increased website accessibility for users of all abilities, from any location, and using any device. Digital UX and accessibility go hand in hand. Without an accessible site, you aren’t providing the best experience for all of your users. To be fully accessible, make sure you’re compliant with updated WCAG guidelines and Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
More online engagements and conversions, whether that’s in donations, prospective student registration, event signups, or something else. The more people who have a good time on your website, the more they’ll come back and engage with your offerings!
To summarize, good UX, especially on your higher ed website, can lead to higher supporter retention rates, higher engagement rates, and an overall lower cost for website development and support. Ultimately, optimized UX makes fundraising and receiving gifts easier than ever.
3. What are the UX best practices to follow?
Now that you know digital UX can impact your higher ed website and fundraising efforts, let’s talk about some of the ways you can tweak your own site to ensure it is leveraging all opportunities.
While the gaps in your website UX will be unique to your specific situation and audience type, there are some general guidelines and best practices that should be followed:
Use a flexible website builder/CMS. CMS platforms like Drupal or WordPress are popular CMS solutions due to their comprehensive core system and wide option of third-party integration tools.
Test your website load speed. No one likes to wait forever for a webpage to load. In fact, studies have found that 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. A delay of just 1 second can even drop conversions by 7%. Use this free Google tool to test your own website load speed.
Keep your design user-focused. It can be easy to get lost in the aesthetics and design of your website. But just because your site is pretty to look at doesn’t mean it’s functional and intuitive for users to use. Keep your design user-focused and make sure elements are catered to ease.
Ensure it is mobile optimized. With 70% of web traffic coming from mobile phones, it’s critical that your higher institution website looks great and is functional on all screen sizes.
Optimize your online donation pages and forms. You want to make your online donation page and forms easy to fill out and complete. To streamline the giving process, Qgiv’s guide to donation pages recommends limiting distractions and unnecessary content, getting rid of repetitive information, only including essential form fields, and keeping the overall design simple. of repetitive information, only including essential form fields, and keeping the overall design simple.
Make your forms inclusive and accessible. Speaking of forms, make sure those forms are as accessible and inclusive as possible! It’s critical to not accidentally exclude anyone because your fields don’t account for shorter last names or genders other than male and female.
By prioritizing digital UX for your higher ed institution, you can not only increase your fundraising efforts but overall have a much better working and long-lasting website.
To ensure that your site supports your higher ed fundraising goals now and in the future, it’s recommended you track your website traffic and data over time. For instance, if you see users landing on your donation page but not completing the forms, then you know that the design needs to be tweaked.
If you want more help on taking your digital marketing and higher ed fundraising to the next level, turning to a professional fundraising trainer might be your best bet.
Wrapping Up
Taking in the lessons from the last few years, a focus on your digital engagements and processes is crucial. If you want to improve your higher ed fundraising efforts, taking the steps to improve the digital user experience is your best bet. Take the advice from this guide and good luck!
