Asking donors to cover credit card processing fees (usually 2% to 3% of the donation) is often marketed as a clever way to squeeze a little more revenue from your online donors.
Does it work?
Not in this experiment reported by NextAfter: How introducing “donor fees” impacts conversion.
The test was very simple. A landing page tested the inclusion of this statement:
Everything else was identical for both versions.
Results to conversation rates:
- Control (no mention of credit card fee: 12.0%
- Test: 7.4%
That's a 38.5% drop in conversion rate. About 60% of donors opted to cover the fees. This drove up the average gift by 3%. But overall revenue was 20.5% lower.
Small win, but big loss.
The hypothesis is that bringing in transactional language about the fees short-circuited the highly emotional act that charitable giving is.
There may be other tests with different results out there, but think twice before you put this one into action on your website. It may look like free money, but it might not work that way.
