Increase Donations with Accelerated Mobile Pages
3 min to read ✭
Accelerated Mobile Pages
You may or may not have heard of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. On the mobile Google Search Network, these pages are now displayed in a carousel above everything else with a little lightning bolt to signify their speed. Currently, these pages rank #1 in SEO for trending news.
Here, we searched for “nonprofit news.” The top stories are pages that have been built with the AMP language, and you can see the little lightning bolt next to their age. The rest of this post will actually be about the benefits of fast mobile pages for your fundraising campaigns, but you can hopefully imagine the impact of your nonprofit organically appearing at position #1 on Google.
AMP History
In late 2015 Google created an open-source platform for the most talented developers around the world to unite and collaborate on a new type of code called AMP HTML. The open source platform can be found at www.ampproject.org, and the new coding language is meant to load rich content like videos, photos, and other dazzling widgets instantaneously.
Putting all this into English – For a little over a year there has been a collaborative project started by Google to help mobile webpages load INSTANTLY.
Google is unwaveringly committed to user experience and continuously strives to make both its advertising and search results more relevant. Here’s what Google has to say about the reason behind this project:
“Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we access information, and today people consume a tremendous amount of news on their phones. Publishers around the world use the mobile web to reach these readers, but the experience can often leave a lot to be desired. Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader—and the opportunity to earn revenue…” (Source)
What does this mean for your nonprofit?
As the world becomes more saturated with generations that expect instant results (hello Gen X & Y), it becomes more important for your webpages to load quickly. If your campaign’s main donate page takes too long to load, your potential donors will invest their money with another organization. Even worse, they may not make a donation at all!
65% of social media actions are taken on mobile devices
Depending on the demographic of your audience, this means roughly ⅔ are engaging with your major fundraising campaign posts & shares from their phones. (MobileCause)
51% of website visits happen from mobile devices
You may have known this already, but on average more than half of your traffic is visiting you from a mobile device. In addition, MobileCause specifically found that mobile responsive donation pages yield 34% more in gifts than others. (MobileCause)
14% of all donations happen on mobile devices (2015)
We haven’t gotten the data from 2016 yet, but we know that mobile devices experienced a 45% growth in popularity for donations between 2014-2015. How many potential donors were not included in this statistic because nonprofits’ donate pages loaded slowly? It’s hard to say the exact number, but we would likely see more than 14%. (npENGAGE)
Thinking about your own mobile pages?
Hopefully you can see that mobile-optimized pages are extremely important to the success of your online giving efforts (and getting more important every day).
Let’s bring it back to the beginning – Is the AMP project worth investigating for your nonprofit’s mobile donation pages?
Is AMP worth it?
It really depends on several variables, with the main one being budget. While there are a multitude of programs that allow the general population to build beautiful and effective websites (think Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress), the same options don’t exist for Accelerated Mobile Pages yet.
There are a handful of proprietary softwares out there that allow people like you and me to build AMP without knowing the coding, but the pricing of these packages is not an option for most nonprofits. Unless you have a talented developer/coder on your team who’s willing to learn a new coding language, or extra capacity in your marketing budget, it would probably be best to wait until AMP are more accessible.
For now, we recommend using other methods of keeping your vital campaign donation pages quick and mobile-friendly. You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to gain insights into the functionality of your crucial pages on a mobile device. There are other sites that provide unique information on your main pages as well, such as MobileTest.me and mobiReady.
Keep checking back for future posts as the digital landscape continues to change. We will have the latest information about the AMP project for you as soon as it becomes viable for nonprofits everywhere!
