Your donation journey is leaking money. Here's where.

Between 50% and 70% of people who reach a charity donation page leave without giving. Here's where the journey leaks, and how to fix each stage.

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Somewhere between 50% and 70% of people who reach a charity donation page leave without giving. These are not casual browsers. They clicked "Donate". They were ready.

Most charities respond to flat income by trying to get more people to the site: more campaigns, more ads, more posts. But if your journey leaks, more traffic just means more people leaking out. Fixing the journey is almost always cheaper than buying the traffic, and the fixes rarely need a rebuild.

Here's where the money goes, stage by stage.

Start with the maths

The average donation page converts at around 15 to 17%. That number makes the opportunity concrete. If 1,000 people reach your donation page each month and your average gift is £25, every percentage point of conversion is worth £250 a month, £3,000 a year. Find two or three points of improvement across the journey and you've funded the work several times over.

The point isn't the exact figures. It's that small leaks compound, and so do small fixes.

Leak one: the journey to the button

Before anyone abandons your donation form, plenty never find it. Donate buttons tucked into hamburger menus. Campaign pages that tell a moving story and then trail off with no ask. Appeal emails that link to the homepage rather than the giving page.

Walk your own site as a first-time visitor. From any page, can you reach the donation form in one click? On your most-visited content pages, is there a clear next step? If someone reads your impact report and feels moved, what exactly are they supposed to do?

Leak two: the off-site redirect

This is the big one, and the one charities notice least because it happens on someone else's platform. A supporter clicks "Donate" on your site and lands on a third-party form with different branding, different fonts and a different URL. The visual handover reads as a warning sign at exactly the moment they're entering card details.

Research from Fundraise Up puts the cost at a drop of at least 8% in conversion when the form is off-site rather than embedded. Trust is the currency of the whole transaction, and the redirect spends it.

You don't necessarily need to leave your donation platform. Most of the major ones now offer embedded or branded options. If yours doesn't, that's worth knowing before you renew the contract.

Leak three: the form itself

Once someone is on the form, every field is a chance to lose them. Forced account creation. Title, date of birth and a landline number nobody has. No Apple Pay or Google Pay, so a mobile donor has to go and find their card.

Mobile matters more than most donation forms acknowledge. A supporter moved by something on their phone during a commute will not pinch-zoom through a ten-field form. Ask for what you need to process the gift, offer wallet payments, and let everything else wait for the follow-up email.

A useful test: time yourself making a £10 donation on your own site, on your phone. If it takes more than a minute, you have work to do.

Leak four: the moment after

The journey doesn't end at the payment confirmation. Almost half of donors never engage with a charity again after their first gift, and the confirmation screen is where that pattern starts.

A bare "transaction successful" page treats a moment of generosity like a utility bill. Instead, use it: say what the gift makes possible, invite them to follow the work, make Gift Aid easy if they skipped it. The thank-you email deserves the same care. This is the cheapest retention tool you have, and most charities leave it on default settings.

How to find your own leaks

You don't need to guess where your journey fails. GA4 will show you the funnel: how many people reach the donation page, start the form, and complete it. The step with the steepest drop is your priority. Pair that with watching two or three real people attempt a donation on a phone, and you'll learn more in an hour than in a quarter of internal debate.

Then fix one leak at a time, measure, and move to the next.