Why Should You Use Popups for Nonprofit Websites?
It's no coincidence that many of the most successful and well-known brands still use popups on their website.
That's because popups still work and you should consider using them too if you want to drive more donations to your nonprofit organization.
We have listed the most important reasons why you should consider using popups on your nonprofit websites below.
Popups Let You Be More Customized
Using geo-targeting, you can create popups based on your users' location and provide more relevant, targeted promotions for current and/or potential supporters and donors.
If you are an international or multicultural organization, this feature allows you to target visitors based on their language and customize your multilingual campaigns.
Popups Help You Retain Your Audience
Using exit intent popups is a great method to prevent your website users from navigating away.
Most marketers use exit intent popups to save abandoned carts and increase their revenue by up to 30 percent.
Then, why not use them on your nonprofit website so that visitors are motivated to take action and take part in a good deed before they leave?
You can take a look at some of the best exit intent popup examples to get inspired to create your own design that provides higher value for your visitors and engages them more.
Popups Build You a Great Email List of Potential Volunteers
Creating dynamic and customizable popups and opt-in forms that can be embedded on your nonprofit organization site is a great way to start your journey of building an email list.
You can use email marketing segmentation to target more relevant groups of users or potential contributors and keep them informed about your missions by sending them newsletters.
8 Tips on How to Use Popups for Nonprofit Websites
You may know how effective popups are for your website but still wonder how you can increase donations with popups and promote fundraising campaigns.
Well, this list of best practices can help you make the most out of your popups and develop updated fundraising plans for your nonprofit website.
So, let's dive right in, shall we?
1. Use Trigger Words & Related Graphics
Make use of the power of words and grab your visitors' attention with emotional trigger words that provoke a psychological reaction.
Just put words and interesting visuals together, and boom, the user is hooked.
One of the best popup design practices is to make the most out of the space you have by adding relevant images and styles in your popups.
Try to use visuals related to your missions and adapt your popup design to your overall website's style.
In fact, the more unique your popup is, the more likely it will stand out.
Try to customize your popups with emotional trigger words and images related to your mission but remember not to sound pushy or manipulative.
You can use screenshots of past contributors' testimonials or display the cause of the fundraiser.
Here you can see another great popup example from The Humane Society of the United States, a nonprofit organization promoting animal welfare and opposing animal cruelty.
Their use of relevant images to trigger viewers' emotions and their short and to-the-point CTAs to persuade them to take action are impressive.
2. Choose the Right Time to Showcase Your Popups
Yogi Berra, a professional baseball player, once said, "You don't have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it'll go."
There is also a similar rule that applies to popups.
Timing is another key element that you must consider when promoting your fundraising campaign and trying to increase donations with popups.
It is not good to have a popup appear as soon as the user opens a website, so try to position it well when the user opens your website.
The best way to showcase your popups at a proper time and place is to use an easy-to-use popup builder that gives you features like targeting your visitors' behavior.
The feature allows you to show your popup once a visitor views your website content after a certain period of time or after a certain percentage of scroll activity on your target pages.
This way you can customize your popup not to be intrusive and choose the best moment to capture your visitors.
See how Four paws, a global animal welfare organization, uses an exit-intent newsletter popup to stay in touch with visitors and grow its email list
Additionally, keep in mind if you're using a full-screen popup overlay, make it easy for visitors to close it and continue using the website.
Take into account the freedom of your users' choice and see how it can lead to more donations and contributions.
3. Use an Eye-Catching Call to Action
A great CTA starts with persuading the reader, and it ends with them taking action.
Don't just use generic CTAs you see everywhere, be creative and use a word or phrase that aligns with the next step you want the reader to take.
You can see a popup example below from the [nonprofit American Heart Associasion](https://www.heart.org/.
The popup offers two different calls to action with a to-the-point and clear objective. You can choose either to "Donate Once" or "Donate Monthly".
Using relevant imagery with eye-catching, direct CTAs and showcasing it at the right time and right place is the key to making this popup stand out.
4. Make It Easy for Viewers to Engage
If you are using a popup to engage with your audience, then your mission should be to make it easier for them to take action.
Using CTAs as a navigation tool will help you direct users to the donation page, which is where you want them to engage with your campaign.
In addition, if you are asking for donations in your popup, it's a good practice to offer tiers by which you specify the amount (e.g., $10, $15, $50).
To increase donations, nonprofits must make it as easy as possible for their users to engage with their mission, so giving them a short list of donation levels is an effective way to do so.
If you are using different fields like the popup example below, it's best to use prefill form feature and make it easy for your visitor to engage with your campaign.
As a result, they are more likely to donate what you give them instead of thinking on their own about how much they can contribute.
5. Inform Users of Your Organization's Mission
In addition to being a great tool for making a quick connection with your user, popups allow you to tell them exactly what they can do to contribute to your mission in your own words.
Provide data about your mission, and if you have already started the process, showcase it with pictures and statistics and ask users for help to finish what you have begun.
The goal should be to provide a constituent engagement with your users and show them what they are donating for.
Rather than taking the time just to create a visually attractive popup, focus on your value proposition for why you want or need the user to take the action you want.
You can use many different "hooks" to entice users to take action.
Nonprofit organizations have the power to touch people's hearts with their mission, which is a good place to start.
Try to explain why even a few dollars can make a big difference or the reason users need to know what your organization is up to.
6. Grow Your Email List & Keep Your Users Updated
Your email list is your treasure trove of information for building a tailored relationship with your contributors.
Try to keep your design and copy as simple as possible once you are asking for the users' email addresses.
Think about it in terms of seconds – if your value proposition isn't clear to the user within two seconds (or less! ), you're not defining it clearly enough.
When all you need to contact a user is their email, why bother them with so many fields?
There is often a strong correlation between better user experience and greater engagement when the number of input fields on a popup form is reduced.
By following these tips, you can build yourself a long list of high-quality leads that you can follow up with via email marketing campaigns and update them on your mission.
7. Make Sure Your Popup is Mobile Friendly
According to a nonprofit source statistics report, half of the nonprofit website traffic came from mobile.
Therefore, no one can deny that mobile traffic is becoming more important. If your nonprofit website is not optimized for mobile devices, then you are missing out on a lot of donations and potential funding.
Try to customize and optimize desktop and mobile popup versions with different configurations for the best user experience.
Using Popupsmart, you can easily switch between desktop and mobile views to make changes to elements as smoothly and quickly as possible.
8. Help Users Navigate Easily with Popups
Ultimately, you need to use the popup to make sure your users can find what they are looking for.
Use the cookie data to optimize the website visitors' experience and give them a more customized experience.
Help them navigate to your fundraising page or direct them to the report of your recent mission on your website.
Just make sure you haven't used too many steps on your popups for the user to complete to get to the destination page.
How to Create Popups for Nonprofit Websites with Popupsmart
By following these tips, you can create an engaging experience for your nonprofit website visitors and increase your quality leads.
Having these principles in mind, your popup will be more likely to convert and ultimately help you achieve your donation goals.
With Popupsmart, users can build popups that increase conversions and a better user engagement without having to know how to code.
First thing first, create a Popupsmart account if you don't already have one. Once you log in to your account, you're taken to a dashboard where you can see the different sections you can access.
Next, simply click on "Create a new popup" in the dashboard to create the first popup for your nonprofit website.
Following that, you need to select your business objective. There are six different business objectives designed to meet different organizational needs.
Let's pick "Show Up Announcement" in this guide for nonprofit organizations.
After choosing your objective, a window will appear asking you to "Create a Popup Campaign".
Here you should pick a name for your popup campaigns and add your website domain. Once you have added them, click "Save and Close " to start the designing process.
You can see different ready-made popup templates on the "Layouts" page; click to choose a layout that fits your business's style and needs.
Next step, click on the "Next to Customize" button. This is where you can customize your popup to align with your mission and overall brand identity and style.
You can edit your layout's headline, description, and button parts considering the aims of your announcement popup.
With this design, we used a famous quote from Mahatma Gandhi to evoke emotion in the visitors and prompt them to donate clean water to people in need.
Additionally, you can add an image and edit it freely here.
We used an image related to the mission and showed how the donation could change other people's lives.
To allow the user to donate in their preferred way, we gave them **two different CTAs so the donation can be made either once or monthly.
Once you have finished customizing your popup, you need to go to the next step and click on the "Target" button.
Here is where you can choose various targeting options like selecting your visitor behavior or their devices.
The "Visitor Behavior" section allows you to show your popup after the visitor has been on your website for a certain amount of time or set up an exit-intent popup.
Furthermore, in the "Audience" section, you can also optimize your popup's targeting according to "Operating System," "New Visitors or Returning Visitors," "Browser Language," "Traffic Source," and "Geo Located."
To improve engagement, you can also create personalized, on-site marketing messages with a smart tag dynamic.
Once you've finished setting up your targeting, click on the "Next to Publish" button and set your publishing options.
You can preview how your popup will look on mobile devices and optimize it for the best user experience.
Now, if you click on your website domain, you can see the popup code you can add to your website.
Click on the "Copy to Clipboard" to copy your code, and paste it before the closing < /body > tag on your website dashboard.
Make sure to verify your website; otherwise, the publish button will be unclickable.
When you check the "Publish" section, you can also choose to integrate with Google Analytics.
Additionally, in the last step, you can customize "Respondent email notifications" and the "On-click popup button creator" in this section.
Ultimately, publish your popup by clicking the "Save & Publish" button.
Here is the final look of the popup we've created together in this guide:
Just like that, you can create an engaging and highly potential popup to promote your fundraising campaigns.
As a Final Note
Now that you have the tips and the guide to creating popups, it's time to take action.
You can use Popupsmart to create the first popup on your nonprofit website and combine all the tips above.
Having popups on your website will increase your donations and chances of raising finance for the goodwill because
Go ahead and create your first popup and let us know if you have any questions.
FAQs
What Types of Popups Can You Use for Nonprofit Websites?
You can determine it based on the behavior of your visitors. However, there are different popup types on Popupsmart. Some of the popular ones are exit intent popups, full-screen popups, lightbox popups, and floating bars.
Can Nonprofit Organizations Use Ads?
The short answer is yes. Nonprofit organizations can use advertisements to draw more traffic to their website. They can also use popups to welcome their new users and capture their information for further marketing purposes.
Can You Use Popups to Recruit Volunteers?
Definitely yes. Popups are a great way to hook users' attention. Using the right targeted popup, you can attract specific groups of people interested in volunteering for your nonprofit organization.
You may also want to look at these related topics:
- The 13 Best Website Builders for Nonprofit Organizations
- How to Target Custom Audience with Popupsmart
- How to Build Vue Modal Popups
