Blog:

Donating money to a charity should be as quick and easy online as it is to stuff a few coins in a collection pot on the high street. It should also be apparent what the money will be used for.

With these two things in mind, it is surprising how often charities miss the mark when it comes to their online donation screens. Fiddly pull-downs, peculiar microcopy, trillions of steps, and minimal transparency.

Here are some of our step-by-step notes and drafts from a concept exercise on behalf of a well-known charity. The goal was to create a screen that encourages more site visitors to give, and give larger amounts.

We don’t know if these ideas will ultimately be used, but they illustrate ways of evolving the user experience in a way that should increase the amount of money collected.

The starting point

(Disclaimer: we combined two screens in to one to have a truly poor starting point for the exercise.)

The centre of the donations page has the words “Charge me” followed by one drop-down menu with well over fifty options starting at $2.00 increasing by one dollar up to $30 and then in larger increments up to the $1000 mark. The second menu has only one option: zero cents.

You have all your important data backed up, right? I mean, come on folks, it’s 2010. We may not have flying cars yet like we’re supposed to, but “having backups” is a problem that’s solved. And I’m sure you’ve solved it. I’m sure you sleep well at night knowing that if a comet hit the data center where your website lives, and everything was completely destroyed, you could get back up and running somewhere else quickly enough.

Except that the chance this is actually true for you, statistically, is very small. If we look at the statistics, then what we see is that people are storing increasing amounts of things, important things even, online because disks keep getting bigger and cheaper (though sadly not much faster, but that’s a different article).

But despite this availability of cheap storage, people for the most part still don’t back things up. This isn’t universally true of course, there are some folks who have implemented really brilliant backup systems at their companies.

Of course, it helps when you have an amazing systems guy on your team who is made out of lighting bolts and awesomeness, taking care of the nitty gritty details for you. If, however, you are one of the many many people who doesn’t have a good backup strategy in place, this article is here to help you out.

I’ve written a shell script (Ed: please remove .txt extension before use) that will serve as a good starting point, and we’ll talk through it in a little bit. For now though, let’s discuss backups in a more general sense so we can decide what our end goals are.