Missions to Movements
Missions to Movements is the nonprofit marketing and fundraising podcast that helps you grow recurring donors, scale monthly giving programs, and build digital campaigns that convert.
Hosted by Dana Snyder—speaker, strategist, and founder of Positive Equation—this show is packed with actionable nonprofit growth strategies, social media tips, and fundraising best practices.
Each week, you’ll hear how organizations are increasing donor retention, building thought leadership, and using digital fundraising to drive real impact. If you want to learn how to attract monthly donors, master nonprofit marketing, and transform your mission into a movement, this podcast is for you.
Missions to Movements
The Secret to 50% More Donations: A/B Testing & Mobile Giving Breakthroughs with Scott Cross
Did you know that only 11–12% of visitors who click “Donate” actually complete their gift? That conversion gap represents a massive missed opportunity for nonprofits, and Scott Cross, sales leader at iDonate, has the data and tools to help you capture more donor intent – especially on mobile.
Scott breaks down how simple A/B tests, mobile-friendly donation forms, and new pop-up giving tools are helping organizations see up to a 50% lift in completed donations and a 23% boost in recurring gifts. We also dig into how to simplify your donation page without losing storytelling power, AND the small tweaks that make a big difference during year-end campaigns.
For nonprofits of all sizes, this conversation is packed with ideas to make small, strategic changes to your online giving experience so you can yield dramatic results without requiring significant additional resources.
Resources & Links
Connect with Scott Cross on LinkedIn, at the upcoming NIO Summit in Kansas City, or via email at scross@idonate.com.
Episode 196: Is Your Donation Page Leaking Donors? Here’s How to Fix It
This show is brought to you by GivingTuesday! GivingTuesday is a global generosity movement that started in 2012 with a simple idea: a day to do good.
This year, on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, join the conversation: share your favorite nonprofit’s campaign, volunteer for a cause you care about, share an act of kindness, or encourage your audience to do the same.
Use #GivingTuesday, tag @GivingTuesday, and visit GivingTuesday.org/Participate to get involved and inspire others!
Let's Connect!
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Welcome back to Missions to Movements. I am your host, dana Snyder, and today we're diving into one of my favorite topics how nonprofits can make online giving as seamless and donor-friendly as possible. My guest today is Scott Cross. He is a passionate sales leader with more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-performing teams across SaaS, b2b service delivery models and now at iDonate, which we're so thankful to for being our partner this quarter.
Speaker 1:Scott is helping nonprofits reimagine the online giving experience by really removing friction, boosting conversions and creating donor journeys that truly inspire, and anytime I get to talk to somebody that works at a platform, I love it because we get to talk about some macro trends that they're seeing across their client base. So in this conversation, we're going to talk about something called the conversion rate gap. I had a previous episode referencing this why donors with intent often don't complete their gifts, but really practical ways to close it. Scott's going to talk about iDonate's new pop-up donation tool and how they're seeing it drive tremendous recurring giving, how you can complete simple A-B tests that can lead to some really big wins and transformations, and how to prepare right now for a year in campaigns and beyond. So no matter whether you are leading a national organization or running a lean but mighty team. You'll walk away with a lot of actionable ideas from today's episode, so let's go ahead and jump in and meet Scott.
Speaker 2:What the pop-up form actually does is, in a timed way, it will surface on the website when somebody is in that nonprofit's website. So we talked about that conversion gap. This is a way, essentially, that you can surface a focused campaign or a unique campaign or a giving day or whatever it may be, at the right moment when somebody is visiting your site and has interest and has that donor intent that we talked about. And we've seen actually really great results. We've seen an increase of about 50% against traditional forums and then 23% lift in recurring gifts, which is massively impactful over time.
Speaker 1:So one of the favorite things when someone like you, scott, is sitting across from me, that I like to ask is you work with hundreds of nonprofits and so you see things on a much more macro scale of trends that can be seeing and noticing and how organizations are planning for projecting for the end of year, specifically in regards to 2025?
Speaker 2:So we have clients and prospects of all sizes that we engage with. So what I'm seeing with nonprofits is a deeper focus kind of on the online giving experience and not just self-serving saying that, but I see a lot more focus on their online giving experience and the donor experience being kind of highlighted, especially as you go into year end. You know the nonprofits are making sure that they have, you know, the right tools and the right campaigns and everything in place much earlier than I'd seen in the past. But I'd say the big trends that we see are around the adoption and focus on like really refining that experience for the donor, making it streamlined, making it easy to give and review of the tools that they use to do that Right.
Speaker 2:So you know, online giving is one component of all the year end fundraising that happens. But we've seen a lot of focus there, especially on kind of the mobile experience, whereas that sort of was a ride along almost in the past.
Speaker 3:Now, we see a lot of focus on.
Speaker 2:like you know, we see huge numbers giving from devices, and that's a trend that's going to continue, and so that's kind of one of the things we see a lot of focus on as we kind of approach the as early as it seems.
Speaker 1:Now the year-end giving season, yeah yeah, it's going to be here before we know it. I know we're at the end of September already. We're going to blink and for a lot of this conversation, please join us. Our webinar that we're doing is today at 2 pm Eastern time. So if you are listening to this in the morning sipping your coffee on the drive to work, you still have time to register for that. We're going to go way more into the weeds of trends and really some actionable steps for you. So you can click the link down in the show notes to be able to access that webinar. And if you can't make it live, still sign up and I'll make sure to send you the recording.
Speaker 1:I want to go into what you're talking about. Maybe it's because of mobile devices. There is this big emphasis on digital and I loved a blog post that your team had put together earlier this year. Actually, I went really deep into it around the conversion rate gap in episode 196. And I talked about is your donation page leaking donors and how to fix it, and it's really interesting because it's not talked about a lot the emphasis of the space between donor intent and then actually completing the gift. Why do you think that gap exists and how have you been working with the team and your clients on closing that? And for those that didn't listen to episode 196, can you give a little bit of context to what I'm talking?
Speaker 2:about? Sure, I think what it really stems around is, you know, nonprofits have a pretty good track record of being able to attract a lot of people into their websites and onto their donation pages, generating interest. They get a lot of visitors. They're able to have a good presence, strong presence out in the world to really promote what they're doing in their mission right. So they'll have their own identity and that's through their website and through their brand which attracts a lot of visitors.
Speaker 2:But the conversion gap is all visitors don't complete the form, and not even all those that click the donate button or click the donate now or the give now button and move into the form, complete it and in fact it's kind of astoundingly low.
Speaker 2:So 11 to 12% actually convert. So if you think about that, there's a huge opportunity to convert more visitors into actual donors. There's a lot of reasons why they don't complete the form. Some of it is they're shopping and they're looking for the right organization to give to, to support a cause, or they're just looking at different opportunities of giving across their own broad spectrum of interests. It may not be the right time to give, so they may just be visiting the site and they click the form to see what the form looks like, or to see what the story is within the form, or see what the images and the text story can be. So a lot of times there's that kind of layers of an order of interest, from just like casual visitor to intent to donate and then sort of everything in between. Our advice to nonprofits is to make it easier as much as you possibly can, and the formula we use is really simple Compelling stories, simple process and easy giving. Easier said than done sometimes, right?
Speaker 2:So removing extra fields, removing points where donors may have to make extra clicks or move around a page or scroll down a page. Those are places where you see a lot of dropout in giving, and so the you know, the better that our clients do and all nonprofits do, I think the higher the conversion can be.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I love so. Grace Daniels, on your team, was part of our Sustainer Slack group for an expert Q&A a couple months ago and she did these donation page tune-ups and they were fabulous. People were throwing their URLs out for how they can be optimized and just such great concise tweaks. Sometimes it doesn't have to be this major overhaul, but it's like hey, have you considered the order that this is asked? Have you considered where your form should be, especially on your mobile placement, like making sure, to your point, don't just look at it on desktops. That's primarily where we are in our offices. We're on desktop, and the mobile traffic you're talking about, is it accessible? Can you find the ways to give? Do you see recurring as an option? Is it easy to give recurring All those things?
Speaker 1:Something else that was mentioned in the blog post, which I will make sure to link to in the show notes, was also think about the type of giving experience based upon the moment in which you're asking. Yes, there is such a missed opportunity, I think a lot of times on blog pages. For instance, like an exercise I run through is do you have top performing blog posts that are just found from Google, seo, nowchat, gpt, and if there's a really compelling story there, is there an ask woven in? Is there a pop-up that can appear at the right time, which is mentioned in the post Versus? Should it be just a direct campaign page where that's the only thing you wanna direct them to? It was really thought provoking of where are you trying to think about the moment that you're in and what giving experience makes sense to direct them to to try and narrow this gap.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and we try to really help guide that. So our team, you know we we have customer success managers that during the implementation and onboarding process for new clients and they also have their existing clients that they engage with monthly, quarterly, they try to do that guidance to best practices and run through essentially a checklist of all those things, like what Grace did, but Grace did it very quickly and shorter. We do that for all nonprofits so we always offer free tune-ups and free advice, essentially with no strings attached. Usually we want to speak to them and understand what their opportunity is, at a very minimum. But we're always there to kind of help guide and hopefully I'll give them a couple of tidbits or pointers that they can make quick and easy changes to adjust their donation page and raise more money, get larger gifts, get more gifts, get more recurring giving, which is hugely important. So we run through an entire checklist essentially of the features that they can use to really drive those types of behaviors.
Speaker 1:Yes, and speaking to recurring giving, you recently launched a pop-up donation tool to really reduce fiction. Can you explain to people, as much as you can, via audio, what this experience is like and what have you seen since clients have started to implement it, the differences?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so we knew we wanted to launch this pop-up forum and we built it. It's been built for quite a while but we went through some extensive testing with existing clients that were willing to kind of run campaigns that they already had in place using their traditional embedded forms next to the pop-up forms, so really kind of validate that number one we did it properly and that we're actually going to release something that helps raise more money, which we're very confident we did. So the results have been really strong and what the pop-up form actually does is, in a timed way, it will surface on the website when somebody is in that nonprofit's website. So we talked about that conversion gap. This is a way, essentially, that you can surface a focused campaign or a unique campaign or a giving day or whatever it may be, at the right moment when somebody is visiting your site and has interest and has that donor intent that we talked about. And we've seen actually really great results.
Speaker 1:We've seen an increase of about 50% against traditional forms and then 23% lift in recurring gifts, which is massively impactful over time, Exactly, yeah, I think that's the key right that we think about always is the recurring giving is that consistent cash flow that you get to look at month over month over month. It might not give you that big pop that your one-time gifts. However, it's a much more higher retention and listen, you know I talk about this all the time on this show If you tune into any of the monthly giving episodes. I love pop-ups, especially because they're so mobile friendly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Great. On mobile yeah, again, it's the opportunity to really drive focus in a second like and draws the eye and we do see a higher completion rate on those forums and it's working, which is wonderful, and that's the goal. We're always looking for tools and ways and innovations to help our clients raise more money, and even not clients to be aware and them find their ways to make more money.
Speaker 1:Yes, and something that I even like, which is really interesting, is the A-B test that you just referenced, and I know you have a guide on this. You guys are really big on essential guides to donation page A-B testing. That can really highlight very small tweaks Button text, gift arrays, trust badges. I guess when and where is the best place to start testing? Can any size organization do it? Is it intimidating? Because, like when you say something like A-B testing, it can sound like oh gosh, that sounds like a lot of work. What impracticality does that mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have definitely heard that it is somewhat intimidating and like doing the first test is the hardest part, right, and it's not because testing is actually hard, it's getting the resources, taking the time and sitting down and just starting to test Once you actually like, in our tool at least very easy to do A-B testing and you can test all the things that you mentioned. You can test gift arrays, like should my gift array start with 50 and go to 500? Should it start with 100 and go to a thousand? Should it start with a thousand and to 1,000? Should it start with 1,000 and go to 100?
Speaker 2:You can test images, headlines, text, pictures, fields, you name it. So you can kind of whatever you think of or whatever has kind of you've thought. Maybe this would work, maybe we should try updating our text, maybe we should try a different story or a different order of the page or a different layout. You can do those things in our tool within the solution and actually direct some of your traffic to that second form essentially so cool and determine which one actually performs better live, so you actually get real results from real experience.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. So would you recommend I mean, this would be a great thing, I would think, starting with end of year, if you can run them both. And then you, essentially, how long do you typically recommend somebody doing an A-B test or based on the amount of traffic they're receiving, to be able to make a decision of like ooh, A is working better than B?
Speaker 2:You want to get a statistically valid sample as best you can, which, depending on who you ask, it's, like you know, get to 100 experiences if you possibly can. So however long that takes, you know some organizations get a lot of traffic and that wouldn't take very long. Some it takes longer to get to that kind of statistically valid winner. But what you want to do is set an amount of time and we usually recommend a very minimum of 30 days. A lot of them run up to 90 days where you're running these two side by side and it may just be a 10% or a 20% of the traffic gets directed there. But you start to see the statistic validation and then the easy thing to do is, once you have that clear winner, that's what you publish. The key to successfully be testing is then you do it again and you iterate and you go and test the next thing that you may have thought all right, we tried this, what if we change?
Speaker 1:Yes, what if we ask one thing at a time? Yeah, but once you don't know if it was this or if it was that, or if it was.
Speaker 2:That's right. You want to make one change. Sometimes we see two, but like they can't be two hugely impactful feature changes because it just invalidates things essentially.
Speaker 1:Yes and oh my goodness. I remember back when I was in my PR days at an agency in New York City and I received the stack after the election, the testing, holy moly, it was like a stack, it was like a dictionary size Crazy yeah. Yeah, I was like wow, that's intense. We're not talking about that level of A-B testing here.
Speaker 2:Although you could, if you wanted to. And we've done a lot of that testing so we can give you a lot of guidance essentially on like here's the best practices. We've seen over 7,000 tests and stuff. So, like it's, you know, let us do that.
Speaker 1:So cool. Okay. So the A-B testing you can run it in there, direct the traffic through the platform. Yes, Amazing, Okay. So I'm going to pretend that I am a nonprofit organization. Right, it's September 24th. I am. I don't know if I'm behind or I've been busy, but I am working still working on my end of year strategy. I am a midsize team. Let's say that I've got a staff of one to two underneath me, I've got a marketing team or I got a medium set up here. Where would you allocate time? End of September. End of September.
Speaker 2:So end of September is like you're getting to crunch time, actually, believe it or not. So you want to be ready for, like, beginning of Q4. But you should, at that moment, know what tools you're using. No time to make changes to tools at that point. Right, you've selected your tools. You know your online giving platform in and out.
Speaker 1:Your team is trained on how to use it and utilize it and get reporting and do all of the things. And thank you for saying that. I think I would call your platform or email and make sure you have the most up-to-date tools that they have. I don't know why, but I think there's sometimes this fear of like calling your platform or like emailing them, but they're there to support you. There are so many times where I've realized it's like, hey, do you have this updated thing? And they're like no, I missed that email. I didn't see that communication that they have this thing Right. Reach out to them, see if they can help you brainstorm.
Speaker 2:So Right, and we will. That's, I mean, that's what our customer success team does, right, so they'll. They'll do a full audit of your page, not a very fast tune up, but a more in-depth tune up to look at the things you're using and things you're not. And you may have reasons why you're not using some of the features, but it's always worth kind of reviewing and talking about. Make sure, hey, you're aware at least of these features.
Speaker 2:And if it's not for one specific end of year campaign, maybe there are multiples and there may be a place for those features, right, so you can start to flesh out, you know where to use different features within the solution that you have. Right, that's kind of the first thing. The other thing is make sure you know what those campaigns are going to be, right. So, like determine, here are the one too many campaigns that we want to run for year end, because we want to drive giving into these specific areas that our organization focuses on and we want to make sure that our audience is aware of those. So, like the end of September, you want to have your images, your text, you want to have your goals set up for what each one of those should perform like and there's always a myth like they always want to outperforms and one underperforms, or hopefully they all outperform.
Speaker 1:They all outperform. Yeah, that's the goal Speaking that into existence for you listener.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but really it's the time to like shore things up, make sure you're comfortable with everything you have at your disposal. Your team is ready and they're trained. They're going to be able to, you know, get into the system. They know how to kind of get into the backend right, your ends when the high volume comes in. But it's also when sometimes mistakes are made on the donor side and they want to. I need a refund. I did this by mistake, or I gave the wrong amount. Can we adjust it? So you want to make sure you also have access to a, you know, either a donor portal or to the team that supports you to be able to make those adjustments. But September is the time to kind of get all the ducks in a row and make sure you're kind of ready to rock.
Speaker 1:Is there an example that you can share where an organization client went through this process with the team optimized, took a look at the donation form Because sometimes that can be missed or looked at the pages and it could be an A-B testing story. It could be a pop-up experience that really had a measurable result for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when we went through that kind of beta testing and we asked existing customers to participate, one of the existing customers gave us like probably one of the better stats, which was that 23% raise in recurring giving. They were running a campaign. They had run it in years past. They were getting ready to launch it again, so they A-B tested it. They ran the traditional embedded form and then they ran new pop-up form. You know, same call to action, same campaign, different experience. They saw the uptick 23% in recurring giving which, like we talked about, is like the gift that keeps on giving and like very important because it's predictable for them as well. So predictable revenue for this particular client was a godsend for them in a lot of ways, because they have a better look at what 2026 will look like I think it is for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah? Well, hopefully it is yes. So they launched the pop-up form and then, as we started to go through the results with them, they decided to use our. We have a you can tick a box. Essentially, that allows the donor to cover fees, so the processing fees, so that more of the donation goes to the user nonprofit right. So they saw a huge uptick from that as well. Well, not huge, but they're seeing an uptick from that. They saw a huge uptick from that as well. Well, not huge, but they're seeing an uptick from that.
Speaker 2:They're seeing a trend, essentially, where they're capturing more of the donations and now they have recurring and predictable revenue and so that was like a really impactful use case where within sort of a couple of weeks and a couple of tweaks, that rhymed. That was cool A couple of weeks and a couple of tweaks. You know they're extremely excited and optimistic about using pop-up forms and adopting them in more places than just one or two for testing. They're going to be rolling them out and expect a lot of huge results from it.
Speaker 1:That's great. I love you speaking to the data point about the processing fees, because I don't think that gets brought up as often and it's small amounts but it adds up over time and especially on recurring donations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a big impact. It can be a big impact and they know there's sensitivity around it. Sometimes there's places to use it and places to not. But you know, in this particular case it was impactful and they were like they're very happy, right now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I would be too. I think I'm all about the choice. I don't think I really. I mean, as a donor and I would say a tech forward donor, I understand that there's fees associated and it's kind of the name of the game, of how it goes, and as long as I have the choice and I'm able to select it or not, then it's like no biggie either way. So I'm going to ask you, of course, a prediction question. You see this large set of data. There's a lot of testing that goes on in the background. We see the GivingUSA reports that come out, working with GivingTuesday Giving Effectiveness Project. If you had to make a prediction of the future of online giving, let's do like six to 12 months. Where do you think organizations should shift today, like right now, to really be prepared?
Speaker 2:I think looking at your mobile first giving experience is probably the place I would start, because that, as we kind of talked about earlier, is a trend that I think will continue. There's more giving and more online giving all the time, so that trend is going to continue. But the mobile trend as the generations age into giving, I will say mobile is going to be more and more and more and more important and more highly adopted. So I would say, look at your mobile giving experience. Don't just necessarily be mobile responsive, that's great. Make sure it renders properly in various different mobile devices and find out if there's anything that can be done if it doesn't render properly, because that's a place where you can potentially lose donors. You know load times and rendering are really important. Actually, when it comes to that experience and that giving and people not just clicking out once they click in there, if it doesn't look right, they're gonna x out, especially younger generations, is what we've read essentially.
Speaker 2:so yeah they'll trust it if it's not loading fast and it doesn't look good we're all busy people and I love that.
Speaker 1:You said also look good. That's very true. I mean your brand completely matters how you present the form matters. It all is giving credibility, expertise. That's right, love that.
Speaker 2:One other trend, though.
Speaker 2:If I can, that I would say over six months, and you know, I think we've all been AI'd to death almost but I do think I will continue into the online giving experience, whether it be simply the nonprofits using AI to help create text or images or enhance those or review those, to even iDonate and other providers are using AI for development of the solutions. We're using it for helping to map integrations and make integrations easier. We're using it to detect security. There's just a lot of places within, not just the creative side of development and the design of pages, but all across the technology side of it as well, and I would look at your provider to sort of see like where are they using it, where aren't they using it, and sort of you know, what does that look like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great, and especially if you're a small organization, how can you use it to help scale? Ask questions. Just get curious. We're having this conversation post-fundraising AI summit. That will just have happened, but I know you are going to be attending NEO. Yes, and so NEO is going to be on what date?
Speaker 2:The end of this month, september 29th to October 2nd, and it's in Kansas City, so yeah, Coming up and I'm sure there will be conversations about AI there. Oh, definitely. We're a big sponsor there, so hopefully everybody comes to see us.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, wait, so tell me this. So I hope everyone listener. I hope you join our webinar today at 2 pm Eastern time. You can click the link in the show notes to register for that. If you are listening to this after effect, that's okay, you can get a recording. What is one thing that you would like to ask for help or support on? And then I want to make sure that people know how to find you at Neo and connect with you if they can't make it. Great, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:So I think, support in just, you know, reviewing your provider, making sure that they have the features, the functions, they're mobile friendly and all the things we've kind of covered today. I work with iDonate. We are innovating rapidly, as I mentioned, and we're using technology and the most modern tools to help improve and make secure giving and better giving and help you raise more money and raise more recurring gifts and just make improvements across the board. So, you know, I would say, take a look at what your online giving experience is and, you know, would love to talk to you, do a tune up for you and help find ways for you to improve the current experience and help your organization improve their mission.
Speaker 1:Love it Amazing and I'm so grateful for our partnership. And there's a really cool kind of like interactive demo that you can do of the pop-up experience on their website too, that I'll link to in the show notes that you can check it out. Where can listeners find you, scott, your team, and if they're going to be at Neo, which I've attended three times, it's very fun, it's very cool. Where can they find you? What will you guys be doing there?
Speaker 2:Love it and I'm looking forward to that as well. You can find me on LinkedIn, so I think it's LinkedIn in Scott dash cross, but you can find me on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:I'm linked to most of the audience. Probably you should be able to find me there, or email is s cross at I donatecom If you ever have any questions or you want to engage. For Neo, we are the title sponsor, so we're kind of a. That's our biggest show of the year we partner with. Next, after who's the host? There's going to be fun games and prizes. There's an experience that I can't.
Speaker 2:Actually I'm not allowed to disclose what it's going to be, but it's going to tie with the theme of Back to the Future, which is the theme of the entire event, and it's going to be really cool. We're going to have a very interesting and interactive booth. We're going to be doing free tune-ups in the booth. We're going to be giving away a wonderful book from our booth.
Speaker 1:It's a good one, guys. Wink, wink. It's very good. It's on recurring giving. It looks like a tequila sunrise, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's right, and so we have games and prizes and giveaways and free tune-ups and lots of fun stuff at our booth. So you can't miss us there, really, but come and find me if you'd like to. I'd love to see everybody and say hi.
Speaker 1:Awesome, perfect. Scott, thank you so much for your time, the work that your team is doing, always coming up with new, exciting things and innovating for the sector. And then have a blast at Neo in less than a week. Yes, it's going to be awesome, awesome. Hope to see all of you on the webinar later today, depending upon when you're listening to this, and thank you, scott, again, for being here.
Speaker 2:Thank you Appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of Missions to Movements. If you enjoyed our conversation and found it helpful, I would love for you to take a moment to leave a review. Wherever you're listening, your feedback helps us reach more change makers like you and continue bringing impactful stories and strategies to the show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, too, so you'll never miss an episode. And until next time, keep turning your mission into a movement.
