Online donations: why donors abandon the donation form at the last step

Someone read your appeal, cared about it and clicked "Donate". At that point the decision is made. The person wants to give money, and all that is left is handing it over. This is exactly where foundations lose the most, though they rarely know it: not on the appeal, not on the photos, but on a form that has too many fields, explains too little and behaves oddly on a phone.

I will not give you a percentage of donors who drop off at the last step. I could not find reliable data for Polish foundations, and the figures circulating online usually have no source. Instead, this piece covers what most often gets in the way on a donation form, how to fix it, and how to measure where people drop off on yours. Your own number is worth more than any average.

We work in Poland, so the details below are Polish: the payment methods people use, the 1.5% tax mechanism, the Polish tax rules for deducting donations. The form design advice applies anywhere, and I point out where Polish specifics come in.

The best-researched case is the online shopping cart, not the donation, so treat this as background rather than a finding about foundations. Baymard Institute has for years asked US shoppers why they abandoned a purchase at checkout. In their figures, 18% named being required to create an account, 17% a checkout that was too long or complicated, and 19% not trusting the site with their card details. A donation is not a purchase and nobody is waiting for a parcel. The mechanics are similar, though: every unnecessary field, every surprise and every moment of doubt is a chance for someone to put the phone down and never come back.

With a donation there is one more thing. A shopper gets something in return, so they have a reason to push through. A donor gets a good feeling and a sense of purpose, and frustration spoils both easily. The donation form should be the shortest and calmest part of your whole site.

For a one-off donation, three things are usually enough: the amount, an email address for the confirmation, and the choice of payment method. A name is useful if you want to thank people personally or issue a donation confirmation, but many payment providers collect it on their own page anyway. Check what your provider requires before you add the same field on your side.

For every further field, ask one question: what exactly will we use this for? A postal address makes sense if you send donors paper thank-you letters, and then it should be optional. A phone number is almost never needed to donate. "How did you hear about us?" is better asked after the donation, on the thank-you page, once the person has done what they came for. The GDPR says this directly: data must be limited to what is necessary for the purpose (the data minimisation principle in Article 5(1)(c)).

Do not force people to create an account. It is one of the most common obstacles, and for a donation there is no justification for it. An account can help people who give monthly and want to change the amount or cancel on their own. Offer it after the donation, not before. If you do have accounts, signing in should not require copying codes or remembering a password without being able to paste it from a password manager. More on that under accessibility.

A few preset amounts plus a field for a custom one is a good layout, because it saves the donor from having to come up with a number. Three or four buttons are enough. If you say what an amount does ("PLN 50 buys a week of food for one dog"), it has to be true and calculated on your own costs. Donors remember sentences like that and do ask about them.

The custom amount field should accept "50", "50,00" and "50.00" alike. In Poland the decimal separator is a comma, many phones offer a dot, and the form should not turn that into an error.

Monthly giving is very valuable to a foundation because it gives predictable income. That is exactly why it is tempting to preselect it. Don't. The choice between "one-off" and "monthly" should be visible, clearly described and left to the donor. Someone who sees a second payment on their statement that they never intended is unlikely to give more, and quite likely to tell people about it. Next to the monthly option, say straight away how to cancel. Oddly enough, that builds trust.

Technically, payment providers handle recurring payments differently: most often through a stored card, sometimes through other methods too. Before you choose a provider, ask exactly what it supports for recurring payments and how a donor can cancel.

In Poland the habits are clear. A large share of people pay online with BLIK, a Polish mobile payment system where you confirm a payment with a six-digit code from your banking app. Pay-by-link bank transfers are also popular: you pick your bank and confirm a ready-made transfer in its app. Then there are cards, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, which are handy on a phone. A Polish donation form without BLIK looks unfinished today. If you collect donations in another country, look at what is standard there instead of copying this list.

These methods are handled by a payment provider. Foundations in Poland use, among others, PayU, Przelewy24, Tpay and Stripe. I will not rank them, because the right choice depends on what you need. When comparing offers, check a few things:

Keep a plain bank account number with a transfer reference on the page as well. Some donors prefer to send a transfer from their own bank, and for larger amounts this is a common choice.

On many forms, clicking "Donate" takes the person to the payment provider's page. A different address, a different look, a different logo. For someone who rarely pays online, this is the moment the question appears: am I still where I meant to be?

You do not have to fight it, just announce it. Before the button, say in one sentence that the payment is handled by the named provider and that they will move to its page in a moment. Show a summary: the amount, one-off or monthly, for which cause. This also meets WCAG success criterion 3.3.4 on error prevention for financial transactions, which requires that the data can be checked, corrected or confirmed before submitting. The amount on the provider's page must match your form to the cent.

The other side of the same thing is the way back. After a successful payment, the donor should land on your thank-you page. After a failed one, for example when the bank declines the card, they should come back to the form with their details still filled in and a message saying what happened, not to an empty home page.

More and more people reach appeals from social media, which means from a phone. Small flaws grow there:

The simplest test: go through your form on your own phone, one-handed, on a tram. Then ask someone who does not know the site to do the same.

An error on a form is not the problem. The problem is a message that does not tell you what to do. Three rules that improve things straight away, and which also follow from WCAG:

Validate a field when the person leaves it, not on every keystroke. "Invalid email" appearing after the first letter only irritates.

This is where we see the most overdoing. Donation forms carry three or four consent checkboxes, often mandatory, because "it felt safer". We are not a law firm, and for a specific case it is worth asking a lawyer or data protection officer, but the basic split is simple.

To accept the donation itself, consent to data processing is usually not needed. Making a donation is a contract, and the foundation also has accounting obligations, so the legal bases are performance of a contract and legal obligation under the GDPR (Article 6(1)(b) and (c)). What the donor is owed is information: who processes the data, why, for how long, and what their rights are (Article 13). That is text to read or a link, not a box to tick.

Consent to a newsletter or further appeals is a separate matter. It should be:

If you plan to email or text donors in Poland, there is also the Electronic Communications Law, in force since 10 November 2024, whose Article 398 requires prior consent for direct marketing through such channels. Whether a foundation's request for another donation falls under it is a question for a lawyer. The safer route is a separate consent for each channel you actually use. Other EU countries have their own versions of these rules under the ePrivacy Directive.

One checkbox for the terms, if you need terms at all, and one optional checkbox for contact. That is usually enough.

Briefly, because the two get mixed up. Poland has a mechanism where taxpayers can direct 1.5% of their personal income tax to a public benefit organisation (an OPP, a status a foundation or association can obtain under Polish law). This does not go through the form on your site. The taxpayer enters the organisation's KRS number (its National Court Register number) in their PIT return or in the Twój e-PIT online service, pays nothing extra, and the tax office transfers the money. Only public benefit organisations on the list kept by the National Freedom Institute can receive it.

It is worth explaining this on your site and showing the KRS number prominently, but separately from the donation form. A "Give your 1.5%" button that leads to a card payment is a quick way to confuse a donor.

The thank-you page is not a formality. The person has just done something good and wants to know it worked. Say that the donation arrived, how much it was, for which cause, and what happens next: when the email will come, where they can see the results. It is a good place for one question, such as how they heard about you, and for an invitation to share the appeal.

The confirmation email also has a practical side. In Poland, a donation for public benefit purposes can be deducted from income in the PIT return, up to 6% of income, and the proof is confirmation of payment to the organisation's account. It helps the donor if the confirmation includes the foundation's full name and details, the amount and the date. Agree with your accountant on exactly what it should contain, but the idea is simple: spare the donor from digging through bank statements at tax time.

For monthly giving, every confirmation should include a link to cancel or change the amount.

A form that cannot be completed with a screen reader or a keyboard alone shuts some donors out completely. I wrote about WCAG 2.2 for foundations more broadly, including a list of the most common mistakes, in WCAG 2.2 for foundations in 2026. Here is just what concerns the donation form:

You can choose the provider's payment page, but you cannot fix it. So when choosing a provider, try its payment page with a keyboard.

Now the most important part: measure instead of guessing. You do not need elaborate tools. A few events in your analytics are enough, one per step:

The gap between steps shows you where the problem is. Plenty of people land, few choose an amount? The trouble is in the form itself or in what sits above it. Plenty click "Donate", few come back successful? Look at the redirect and the payment page. The provider's dashboard usually shows payments started and completed, so you can compare the two numbers.

Privacy-friendly analytics tools are well suited to this, for example Umami, Plausible or self-hosted Matomo. They count events without profiling people, and some work without cookies, which simplifies the cookie banner question. Whether you still need a banner is something to check with whoever handles GDPR for you. One rule with no exceptions: do not send email addresses, names or amounts tied to a person to your analytics. Counting steps only needs the events.

Give the measurement a few weeks before drawing conclusions, and after each change to the form compare the same length of period. With a few dozen donations a month, a single day proves nothing.

We build foundation websites and donation forms, from the part the donor sees to the payment provider integration, confirmation emails and step tracking. We design the form for WCAG 2.2 at level AA from the start, because retrofitting accessibility costs more. It is described on our page for nonprofits, where you can also request a free accessibility report for your site.

If you already have a form and suspect it is losing donors, write to me with a link to your donation page. We will go through it step by step on a phone and a computer and tell you what to fix first. I run the conversation about scope myself, and the team builds the form, the payment integration and the tracking. If it turns out that removing two fields and adding one sentence before the redirect is enough, that is exactly what we will say.