A year ago JustGiving decided to make its donation process simple, fast and easy on mobile devices.

We wanted to create value for our charities and users by continuing to lead innovation in mobile giving.

It was obvious that people needed to ‘give where they are’ quickly and simply, and where they are is increasingly on their mobiles. Our traffic mix was and still is shifting rapidly in favour of mobile devices.

We decided that merely improving the incumbent product wasn’t ambitious enough, so we used the following product vision to focus our thoughts:

“Customers should be able to give wherever they are, without getting their wallet out of their pocket.”

At the front of our minds were the barriers to overcome for mobile payments – some psychological and some because mobile payments still need to be much more simple, intuitive and fast.

In May 2013, we launched ‘one-touch’ donate on mobile, tablet and desktop devices so that our millions of customers can show they care by giving to any of our 10,000 causes with one click of a button.

Before:

After:

By reducing the friction at every possible turn, making the process much more simple and introducing the ‘one-touch’ feature, we’ve seen a huge uplift in conversion.

Overall mobile conversion rate increased by 30% and our ‘one-touch’ donation path converts 90% of the people who start.

Also encouraging is the growth of the ‘one-touch’ feature adoption. Ten per cent of all our donations now come through the ‘one-touch’ feature, and it’s growing every month.

Fears that people would find it uncomfortable to donate this fast have been proved unfounded. We’ve had nothing but positive feedback on social media:

And from our customers:

“It’s the best donation system” – anon

“All my details are stored it so easy” – anon

We expect people will give more frequently as a result in the reduced effort cost of a transaction.

Obviously we’re all well chuffed with the numbers, however it’s often easy to overlook the scale of what it all means, and the scale of JustGiving.

The bottom line

These improvements meant that just three months after launch, the new donation flows had driven an extra 60,000 donations to great causes all around the world.

‘One-touch’  donate was a huge investment and it was a very real demonstration of JustGiving’s huge and continual investment in technology for good.

What’s next for ‘one-touch’?

We recently added the ability to donate using your Facebook log-in details, which we think will increase the likelihood of customers arriving at JustGiving.com with the ability to donate with ‘one-touch’. We’ve already seen that the feature is being used by a large percentage of donors.

We hope that by incrementally reducing the friction of giving and cranking up the social features of JustGiving, we’ll increase the frequency that people give to charity.