Donation Forms Can Be Beautiful Too

I stole this headline from a good article I saw last night in TNW (The Next Web).The premise of the article is that forms are a key part of most websites and there is no reason not to make them attractive and highly usable.The reason the TNW posting "spoke" to me is that much of our business revolves around making highly usable political donation forms that remove the friction from online fundraising. In fact, we've spent a ton of time making WidgetMakr, our fundraising form builder, highly customizable.Each of our clients knows their supporters and their own campaign's needs better than we ever could. That means that we need to give our clients total control over the look, feel and even the data fields of their fundraising forms.  Obviously not all clients have the mad design skills required to create unique sexy forms. That being said, we are seeing some very creative efforts out there.The elephant in the webform design world that the TNW article doesn't address is A/B testing. No matter how beautiful a form is, it needs to be as productive as possible. We've seen changes in donation form design increase the yield of a donation page by over 40%. It is crazy what a huge affect colors and field size can have in terms of usability.Interestingly, some of our clients will create multiple WidgetMakr landing page forms, in some cases up to 20 variations, for each of their emailed fundraising solicitations. The client then A/B tests all the forms in real time to find the highest yielding fundraising form.It is great fun to see our tools used in such creatative ways.