In 2008, non-profits and charities collected about 10% of their donations online, according to a survey by Target Analytics, but usability expert Jakob Nielsen says the amount of money collected online could be much higher — with improved website design and content that answers the donors’ real questions.

To discover how non-profit websites could encourage more donations, Nielsen looked at  user behavior on 23 websites of large and small non-profit groups representing a wide range of causes from animal welfare to museums, to youth programs, to international development.

Topping the list of “donation killers,” Nielsen reports, were content issues (53%) and  usability issues (47%), the latter including a confusing workflow and cluttered pages.  (On 17% of the sites, users couldn’t find where to make a donation!)  Further, there’s commonly a  gap between the information provided by many non-profit websites and what the prospective donors actually wanted in the way of information to help them make the decision to donate: “What are you trying to achieve, and how will you spend my money?”

“Once people had decided to make a donation — and found the donation button on sites that made doing so difficult — it was fairly easy for them to proceed through the workflow and donate” — but getting website users to that important click is the real challenge.

See the Alertbox online newsletter for 30 March 2009, Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-profits and Charities, for Nielsen’s detailed recommendations for how non-profit websites can be improved to get more online donations.