Every search made using your eMatch Donor Link has the potential to double or triple the donation amount your organization receives. With that in mind, you want your gift matching tool to be utilized by every single donor and potential donor who visits your website. To achieve that goal, it just involves a bit of understanding of UI/UX and web design to fully take advantage of an EDL’s potential.

In this article, we’ll cover five general UI/UX principles to help you achieve that goal: Visibility, Location, Spacing, Accessibility, and Engagement. At HEPdata, we recommend the following best practices to maximize the effectiveness of your eMatch Donor Link.

1 – Visibility:

Let’s start with the most important factor which determines the success of your eMatch Donor Link – its visibility on your website. You receive your eMatch Donor Link, you embed it as an iframe, or maybe link it as a hosted page. Then you’re done, right? Not exactly. Visibility matters. Remember, visitors scan websites, they don’t read every single detail. Think of it as driving on a highway and viewing a billboard. The stuff that matters most should stand out immediately, and what should stand out on your donation page is the eMatch Donor Link.

Test this yourself. Go to where your eMatch Donor Link lives on your website. Is it immediately noticeable at a glance? Would a donor feel compelled to make a quick search to see if their company is eligible to match their gift? If the eMatch Donor Link lives at the bottom of a page and takes 45 seconds to scroll down to, the answer is most likely no. In that scenario, it’s likely that a donor may not even see the eMatch Donor Link at all. Remember - every missed opportunity to provide your donor with a quick search is potentially a missed opportunity for your organization to increase its gifting revenue.

Make the process as simple and obvious as possible for your donors. Which area on your website do your donors go to the most often? Place it there!

Here’s a great example of a well placed eMatch Donor Link:

This University places their eMatch Donor Link as the first thing you see when you click on their giving page. When you’re making a donation to their organization, the first step in the entire process is seeing if a company is eligible to match their gift. They’re maximizing their eMatch Donor Link by making visibility a priority in their gifting process.

Here’s another great idea – give Matching Gifts its’ own dedicated page to give it importance and prominence:

Make Matching Gifts an important part of the user journey for each donor. Most importantly, make sure it’s visible without having to go through any extra work to find it.

2 – Location

Visibility and location go hand in hand. In this case, we’re talking about how many places can an eMatch Donor Link live? The fortunate answer is - as many places as you want it to! It’s generally safe to assume that the more places it’s located, the more it’ll get utilized.

Whether you’ve decided on an iframe or a hosted page as your eMatch Donor Link solution, both are extremely versatile and can be placed in multiple locations.

Here are some of the places we strongly recommend placing them in:

Don’t settle for just one location and assume all of your donors will visit that one spot. Place it in multiple areas to maximize visibility and engagement.

3 – Spacing

Spacing may not seem like a critical aspect to a successful eMatch Donor Link, but it’s extremely important. This is because typing in the search box is only one step of the entire process. Once a search is made, a much larger amount of space is required to display the matching eligibilities of the search. It’s crucial that your donor has complete access to the information required to get their gift matched.

This rings especially true if you’re using an iframe solution – at HEPdata we recommend an iframe height of 400 pixels or more and a width of 500px to allow users full access to the data they’re actively searching for.

Note: If your organization is unable to provide an adequate amount of space to the iframe to display its full content, a great workaround is to contact us directly to make each search result in a new tab being opened to show the results of the search. You can make this request by creating a ticket at https://support.hepdata.com

As you can see above, not much room is necessary to display the matching gift tool. However, we need to take into account how searching for gift matching eligibilities is a two step process. Once a search is made and the user hits enter or clicks Search, the matching gifts eligibility information is displayed.

While there was enough room for the search box to display fully, the content of the search results aren’t optimal in this case (the above example uses a height of 180 pixels.) We recommend a minimum of 300px height and preferably 400+ pixels for a better user experience:

4 – Accessibility

Accessibility is absolutely crucial to make sure as many users as possible are able to operate and utilize the content of websites. Particularly for hosted page solutions, accessibility is paramount. The link/button which leads the donor to your eMatch Donor Link needs to be easily clickable at a minimum, but it should also stand out and bring attention to itself. There are many ways to do this – make it your call-to-action button on your Ways to Give Page, or use a slight animation to communicate with the user and guide their experience. There are many different ways of achieving the goal of making sure the link to the tool is accessible and usable for every potential donor.

5 – Engagement

Use your eMatch Donor Link to guide the conversation when your team engages donors. Encouraging your donors to utilize the eMatch Donor Link to check their matching gift eligibility shouldn't stop once the EDL is placed into your website. Remind each donor/potential donor to make a quick search during your email campaign, follow-up, on a thank-you donation page, or on the front of your giving page, etc. Use the eMatch Donor Link as an essential element in your toolkit for your gifting department. The more people who are aware and are making searches, the higher chances your organization has to capitalize on revenue generated by matching gifts.

Don’t be afraid to remind your donors that they could potentially double or triple their gift by making a quick search and filling out a simple form if they’re eligible. They’ll appreciate you more knowing their gift created an even bigger impact for your organization.