Donordigital and Amnesty International USA teamed up to study the best landing page design principles to optimize online donations. The result was an in-depth eleven page report.

The concept was born out of the e-commerce landing page optimization research done by Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Experiments. Donordigital and Amnesty wanted to test the concepts against nonprofit landing pages, so they worked with Optimost to perform sophisticated tests.

I had the opportunity to attend Marketing Sherpa's landing page optimization certification course and I think the methodology applies easily to the work we do in the nonprofit world. But the key take-away from the Marketing Sherpa course was to never rely on instinct alone. Instead, test everything! And that's exactly what Donordigital and Amnesty International USA did to compile this report.

Some of the key takeaways you'll gain from reading this report include:

• How to best control button size to increase donations
• How to use color effectively
• What size text works best in fundraising appeals
• When to use more polite headers instead of more demanding language
• How to get started with testing your own landing pages
• The effect of third-party validation logos (i.e. VeriSign)