If you really want my money...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dslrninja/ | CC BY 2.0

... you should make it as easy as possible for me to give it to you.

I decided to make some online donations to charities before the end of the year -- save a check, save a stamp, get it in before the deadline -- why not? Unfortunately, the experience left quite a bit to be desired. Here are some tips for you, if you happen to be setting up an online donation system for a charity. These are all obstacles I observed on actual charity websites.

1. Make sure your server handles "yourcharity.org" as well as "www.yourcharity.org". If I get a DNS error when I type in the domain, it may not occur to me (or I may not bother) to try the "www".
   
   
2. Put a big "Donate" button in a prominent place on your home page. Most charities have figured this out, but some bury it in a sidebar or disguise it as a "Support Us" navigation link. If I have to spend more than 10 seconds looking for it, I'm going to try a different charity site.
   
   
3. Don't make phone number a required field on the donation form. I don't want you calling me. I'm on the FTC's do-not-call list, if you take the trouble to look. I know, charities aren't required to abide by it, and many of them don't (I'm talking to you, Fraternal Order of Police). So I don't give out my phone number any more. If you require it for a donation, guess what -- I'll give my money to someone else.
   
   
4. In fact, don't make anything a required field, unless it's absolutely necessary to process the payment -- name, credit card number, and expiration date should be enough. After you've got that, you can then put up a form that says "If you would like us to mail you a receipt, please enter your address".
   
   
5. Do you really need the CVV code? How many cybercriminals use illegally obtained credit card numbers to donate to charity?
   
   
6. Oh, and you don't need a CAPTCHA either, unless you're really getting so many spam donations that it's costing you in bandwidth, which I find hard to believe.
   
   
7. In fact, why make me use a credit card at all? Given the general lack of with-it-ness I've seen so far, I think I'm justified in feeling nervous about how you're going to store my credit card number. Plus, if I make several sizable donations to different charities at once, MasterCard or Visa is likely to put a hold on them until they can verify them with me.
   
   But how else, you ask, can we collect donations online? Well, PayPal has been around for going on 12 years now, and Amazon and Google now have similar online payment systems. Besides alleviating security concerns, PayPal is a lot more convenient for me -- I just enter the amount I want to donate, sign in to PayPal, click a button, and I'm all done.

I would like to recommend Charity Navigator as an example of a charity (actually, a meta-charity) that gets it mostly right. Nice red donate button on the home page, options for PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments. Plus, they have some very useful advice about donating to charities.