There’s a moment I keep noticing on charity donation pages that makes me wince.

Someone has read your story. They’ve been moved. They’ve clicked the donate button. They’ve chosen an amount. And then, somewhere between that decision and the thank-you page, they vanish.

They didn’t change their mind. They got annoyed.

The numbers on this are uncomfortable. According to Bloomerang, around 60% of potential donors leave a charity donation page before completing the gift. Other industry research puts the range at 50 to 70%. So, for every 10 people who arrived ready to give, 6 walked away mid-process.

And here’s the awkward bit: you probably didn’t notice. The donations that came through looked normal. The ones that didn’t were invisible.

I think about this a lot, because the donate page is the one screen on your website where the money actually arrives. Everything else is a build-up. So when something is broken there, it’s the most expensive kind of broken.

It also matters more now than it used to. The Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report 2026 found that the British public gave £14 billion in 2025, down from £15.4 billion the year before. Six million fewer people give to charity in the UK than a decade ago. The people who do still give are increasingly precious.

Worth noting, while we’re here: the same CAF research found that an email from a charity is about five times less likely to prompt a donation than a recommendation from a friend or family member. So most of your donors didn’t arrive via your email campaign. They arrived because someone they trust pointed them at you. That’s expensive trust to lose at the form.

In my experience, the leaks tend to happen in five places. Here’s where, and what I’d do about each.

1. Your form is asking too much

You know that feeling when an online form keeps adding fields, and you start to wonder whether it’s actually worth it? That’s what’s happening on your donation page, just faster.

Many charity donation forms still feel like surveys. Title, full name, two address lines, phone number, marketing preferences, organisation type, how-did-you-hear-about-us. Each field is a tiny friction point, and the donor’s patience runs out somewhere around field eight.

This isn’t usually anyone’s fault. Most of these forms were built years ago, often by committee, based on what the database or the fundraising team needed. The donor was the last person in the room when the design got signed off.

The thing is, online giving has changed underneath us. The CAF report found that two-thirds of UK donations now happen spontaneously, often triggered by an appeal, a social post, or a fundraising page. People are giving in short windows of attention, on the bus, between meetings. They don’t have time to complete a 15-field form built for an era that’s mostly gone.

What I’d do instead is:

• Look at every field on your form and ask whether you genuinely need it to process the gift. Not “would it be nice to have,” not “the CRM expects it.” Genuinely need it.
• Move the nice-to-haves to a follow-up email once the gift has actually been completed.
• Use one page if you can. A multi-step form can work, but only if each step feels effortless.
• Ask for anonymity or comms preferences as simple yes/no toggles, not a separate sub-form.

A reasonable test: if your form takes more than 90 seconds to complete on a phone, it’s too long. Time yourself doing it (and please tell me you’ve tried recently).

2. Your mobile experience is letting you down

Mobile is where most of your donation traffic now comes from. It’s also where most of it leaks away.

The 2025 M+R Benchmarks report found average conversion rates of 11% on desktop and 8% on mobile. That gap might sound small, but when half or more of your traffic is mobile, it’s where the biggest losses are happening.

Most of this is down to design. Donate buttons that are too small to tap with a thumb. Forms that zoom awkwardly. Card fields that bring up the wrong keyboard. Confirmation screens that scroll off the bottom of the phone. The donor, who was about to give £20 on their walk home, gives up.

What I’d do instead is:

• Test your donation flow on your actual phone, not in a desktop browser shrunk to look mobile-ish. There’s no substitute.
• Check that your card fields trigger the numeric keypad, not the standard letters keyboard.
• Test on iPhone and Android, because they don’t behave the same.
• Check page speed on 4G, not just on the office WiFi. A donation page that takes four seconds to load has already lost a fair chunk of donors before they see it.

If your mobile conversion is much lower than your desktop conversion, that’s not a donor problem. That’s a form problem.

3. Gift Aid is creating drag, and you’re losing the money anyway

Gift Aid is genuinely one of the best things about UK fundraising. An extra 25p on every £1 from a UK taxpayer, at no cost to the donor, paid by HMRC. According to HMRC’s charity tax relief statistics, UK charities received £1.7 billion in Gift Aid in the tax year to April 2025.

So far, lovely. Here’s the problem.

Most donation forms handle Gift Aid badly. A long, dense paragraph of legal-sounding text. A tick box buried inside it. Questions about UK tax status that aren’t obvious if you’re not an accountant. Donors either skip past the whole section, abandon the form because they’re not sure what they’re agreeing to, or tick the wrong thing.

The result: Charity Today reports that around £564 million in Gift Aid goes unclaimed every year, often because of donation method gaps, missing data, or incomplete declarations.

For a charity raising £100,000 online, getting Gift Aid right is worth up to £25,000. That isn’t a marginal fix.

What I’d do instead is:

• Rewrite the Gift Aid section in plain English. A short sentence, a clear tick box, one line of explanation. That’s it.
• Pre-select Gift Aid for UK donors, and let them untick if they prefer.
• Capture the bits HMRC actually requires (full name, home address) as part of the normal donation flow, not as a separate ordeal.
• Check that your platform is actually submitting Gift Aid claims to HMRC. I’ve seen cases where the technical setup quietly stopped working months earlier, and no one had noticed.
• Have a look at services like Swiftaid if you want to reduce friction further.

A small kindness worth adding: a thank-you email that mentions higher-rate taxpayers can claim back additional relief on Gift-Aided donations. Most of them don’t know this. You’ll be remembered for it.

4. Modern payment options are missing

Your donation form probably still asks for a card number, expiry, CVC, billing address, and postcode. That was reasonable in 2015. In 2026, it’s a friction tax on people you’ve already convinced to give you money.

Most donors expect to pay using saved methods now. Apple Pay. Google Pay. PayPal. A card their browser already remembers. The technology to accept these has been standard for years; most charity donation forms still don’t offer them.

Picture the donor with their phone in their hand, halfway through thumb-typing a 16-digit card number. They’re the most likely person on your whole website to give up. Apple Pay turns that journey from 90 seconds into about 10. Same donor. Same gift. Much higher chance that they will actually complete the donation.

There’s a trust angle, too. Donors are getting more nervous about typing card details into forms they don’t recognise. A NonProfit PRO summary of the Give.org Donor Trust Report noted that around 69% of donors worry their information could be hacked when giving to a new charity. A recognisable Apple Pay button isn’t just a convenience feature; it’s a trust signal.

What I’d do instead is:

• Check whether your donation platform supports Apple Pay and Google Pay. Most modern ones do; if yours doesn’t, that’s a real question.
• Offer PayPal for donors who don’t want to type card details at all.
• Make sure browser-saved card details actually work on your form (sometimes validation rules block them, which is its own quiet disaster).
• For repeat donors who’ve opted in, save their payment method so their next gift is one tap.

Quick test: open your donation page on your phone, and count the taps it takes to complete a £10 donation. More than five is too many.

5. Trust signals are missing right where they’re needed

The moment someone is about to type in their card number is the moment they need reassurance.

It’s the point of maximum hesitation. And in my experience, it’s also the moment most charity donation pages go visually quietest, just when they should be loudest.

A blank-looking form. No security indicator. No clear sense of where the money goes. No charity registration number. No padlock you can actually see. Sometimes the donate page even uses a slightly different design from the rest of the site, so it doesn’t quite look like the charity you were on a second ago.

The donor pauses. Looks at the URL. Wonders. Decides to come back later. (Reader, they don’t come back later.)

That Give.org research also found that nearly four in five donors would stop or pause future giving if they discovered a data breach at a charity they supported. Trust at the point of payment is fragile, and once it’s gone, it doesn’t usually come back.

What I’d do instead is:

• Keep your charity branding visible all the way through the form. The donation page should never look like a different website.
• Show your charity registration number near the donate button. Small, but present.
• Make sure your SSL certificate (the thing that makes your site secure and shows a padlock) is actually working on every page of the donation flow, not just the homepage.
• Add a single calm line about what happens to the money: “Your gift goes directly to [the cause]. Payments processed securely via Stripe.” That’s enough.
• If you can, drop in a small impact reminder right next to the payment step. “£25 covers [the specific thing].” It brings the donor back to why they started.

Just please don’t pile on a wall of trust badges. A row of fifteen certification logos starts to look suspicious, not reassuring.

Where to start

I know this might feel like a lot. So here’s how I’d break it down.

If you’ve got 15 minutes, go and donate on your own page from your own phone, using a real card. Time it. Notice every moment you hesitate or want to give up. That list is your starting point.

If you’ve got an hour, look at your form analytics. Most platforms will show you where people drop off. The biggest cliff edge is your most expensive problem; fix that one first. While you’re there, check that Gift Aid claims are actually arriving at HMRC.

If you’ve got a day, run a proper audit. Test on iOS and Android. Time the page load on mobile data, not WiFi. Count the form fields and ruthlessly cut anything that isn’t pulling its weight. Turn on Apple Pay and Google Pay if your platform supports them. Rewrite the Gift Aid section in human English. Add a clean trust line near the card fields.

If you haven’t got a day, get someone else to do it. This is exactly the kind of work that can be scoped as a targeted improvement, rather than a full website rebuild. You don’t need a new website to fix the donate page.

The bottom line

The donation form is the most important page on your website. It’s the only one where the money actually arrives. And in my experience, it’s often the most neglected part of an otherwise lovely charity site, because nobody’s looked at it properly since it was first set up.

That’s worth changing, particularly now. Total giving is falling, donor numbers are at their lowest in a decade, and the donations you already have are the cheapest growth available to you.

You don’t need a whole new website. You need someone to spend a day in your donation flow with fresh eyes, count the friction points, and quietly fix them.

If you’ve read all that and recognised your own donation page in more than one of these sections, you’re not alone. Most charity donation flows have at least two of these problems running at once.

If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes on yours, tell me about your project, or book a free review for a no-pressure look at where the money’s leaking out.