The Donation Page Only the Founder Could Explain

The donate page offered a single primary action, and it went straight to a generic PayPal screen. A supporter reading that page had no way to know the organization would also take appreciated stock, crypto, a grant from a donor-advised fund, an in-kind contribution or a corporate sponsorship.

Those gifts still happened. They happened because somebody emailed Larry, he explained the options, and the donation followed from the conversation. That works until it is the only mechanism, at which point the organization’s giving capacity is capped by one person’s inbox and the larger, tax-efficient gifts are the ones least likely to be discovered.

The PayPal button also flattened everything behind it. Sending a donor to a payment screen with no context stripped out the festival’s voice at the exact moment it was asking to be trusted with money.

I grouped the methods into Financial Gifts, Stock and Crypto, DAF and Planned Giving, and Offline Giving. The grouping matters more than the list: a donor arrives with an intent rather than a payment method in mind, and the categories let them find the section that matches their situation instead of scanning eight equivalent buttons.

Each method got its own explanation and its own call to action, so the page answers the question Larry had been answering. I added donor testimonials under a “Why give?” heading, because the research kept returning to the same gap: people wanted to know where the money went before deciding how to send it.

The original page had a single Donate Now that led to PayPal, and the effect of that hierarchy was to say the other methods did not exist. Giving each method its own context and its own button was the change that mattered, and everything else on the page follows from it.

Larry reported fewer questions about how to give, which was the point of the exercise. The page also became something the organization could send to donors and partners rather than a step they had to talk somebody through.

The redesign shipped and the page is still live at newfilmmakersla.com/donate, still built around separate routes: crypto, donor-advised funds, stock, wire transfer, check and recurring gifts each have their own place on it.

I have the founder’s report and nothing else. Nobody put analytics on the giving methods, so I cannot tell you whether the donation mix shifted, whether the tax-efficient options got used, or how many people read a section and gave through it. An earlier version of this write-up said donors stopped defaulting to PayPal out of habit, and I have no basis for that.

I would put a click-through count on each giving method now. It costs nothing and answers the only question that matters: which of these five routes anybody wanted.

The old donate page functioned. You could press the button and money would arrive, and convenience was the part that already worked. It could not tell a supporter what their options were or where the money went, and a person answering emails was covering that gap.

The lesson I took is that a page can work and still be offloading its job onto somebody. Larry’s inbox was the missing half of that interface, and it did not show up in any audit of the page itself.