The person who clicked Give on your website already made the hard decision. They believe in the work, they opened their wallet, and they showed up on the page ready to hand you money. When they leave without finishing, it is almost never because the mission stopped moving them in the ninety seconds between the button and the confirmation screen. It is because the form asked something they did not want to answer on a phone at a stoplight.
The 2026 fundraising data keeps pointing the same direction. Mobile giving is now the majority of first-time online gifts for most small ministries we work with, and every extra field on a mobile screen has a measurable cost. A donor who has to zoom in, tap between four keyboards, and hunt for the right dropdown will usually decide the sandwich in front of them is more urgent than finishing the transaction. They mean to come back. Almost none of them do.
Three fields quietly do most of the damage. The first is a required phone number. Unless you plan to call the donor, and unless you have told them why up front, treat phone as optional or drop it entirely. The second is a full mailing address on a one-time gift under fifty dollars. The receipt does not need it, the tax letter does not need it at that amount, and the friction is real. Ask for it later, in a thank-you follow-up, once the gift is already yours. The third is any custom question — "how did you hear about us," "which fund," "any prayer requests" — placed before the payment step. Every one of those is worth asking eventually. None of them belong between a donor and a completed gift.
There is a stewardship instinct at play in all of this. We want to know the people who give, remember them well, and keep the relationship warm. That instinct is right. The mistake is trying to gather the whole relationship inside the two minutes of a donation form. The form is the doorway. The follow-up is where you get to know someone.
If you would like a second set of eyes on where your own giving page is losing gifts, we would love to walk through it with you.