Donations + One Less Decision

I came up with a useful little hack to NationBuilder's staged donation pages I wanted to share. You know, spread the $$$, pay it forward, all that, if you will.

Don't you hate it when donors come onto your donation page and have to choose a donation amount, or worse off, type their custom amount in the "other" field? That's one more click on the donation page, and one more opportunity for abandonment. 

What if they didn't have to? 

No, I did not create a hack for mind reading. That's Google's job.

My hack actually allows you to double up the activity of arriving onto the donation page to also be the activity that chooses the donation amount. 

In staged_donations.js

if(location.search.indexOf('amount=') > -1) { $('#donation_amount_' + (location.search.split('=')[1]).split("&")[0]).prop('checked', true); if(!$("input[name='donation[amount_option]']:checked").val()) { $('#donation_amount_other').val((location.search.split('=')[1]).split("&")[0]); } }

<a> tags, that link to donation pages, should have appended to the end of their href: "?amount=[insert amount here]"

So for example: <a href="/donate?amount=25">Donate</a>

Two use-cases: 

1) Create a donation widget on your homepage with the pre-defined donation amounts. Clicking on one automatically takes you to the donation page with that amount pre-selected.

2) When you send out eblasts, you can tell a user: "Hi, [insert political boundary and/or event] allows you to donate $100. You've already donated $53, thank you! Would you like to donate $47?" Now, most donation pages don't have $47 as a predefined donation button to auto-select. For those cases, I have it autofill the other field with the custom amount. 

1) Email's call-to-action asking the user to donate $63.

2) The link takes you the donation page, which, since it doesn't have $63 as a default option, writes it out in the other field.

Now, an important note here is that my hack doesn't actually take the user directly to stage 2. My first reason for this is that NationBuilder "out-of-the-box" staged donation scheme doesn't tell you what amount you've chosen in stages 2 or 3. I was concerned that this would lead to more abandonment because the user might not feel comfortable putting their payment info in without knowing the amount they are donating. My second reason is, what about an upsell? If the user has seen they're donating $25, but the $50 button is right next to it, calling out to them, they could feel compelled to click it. Boom, more money!

What do you think? Should the hack automatically take you to stage 2? Let me know below!