Quick answer: Donation page abandonment is the silent leak in most nonprofit fundraising, and it concentrates on mobile, where slow pages, desktop-style layouts, and too many form fields stop donors who already decided to give. The Pulse of the Donor 2025 report confirms that a large and growing share of online gifts happen on phones, yet most organizations never look at their drop-off analytics. Track your checkout abandonment rate, separate mobile from desktop, and fix one or two friction points at a time.
Digital wallet donations let people give using Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Venmo without re-entering a card number, and they matter because fewer clicks reliably means higher completion. The report shows that donors who can give in fewer clicks give at higher rates, and the same logic applies to your checkout fields. A long form is friction, and friction costs gifts.
I would argue digital wallets have moved from a perk to an expectation. Anyone who has filled out a long pledge form knows the feeling of glazing over before they finish. The lesson is to keep donations as simple as possible. I know you want all of the donor's information, but you are not going to get all of it on the very first transaction, and trying to is part of what loses the gift.
It helps to understand why a wallet works. The single biggest reason a card-entry form loses people is the card number itself, plus the expiration date, the security code, and the billing zip. A digital wallet collapses all of that into a face scan or a thumbprint the donor already trusts. You are not asking them to do less out of convenience. You are removing the exact steps where people stall, hesitate, and quietly close the tab.
Wallets matter most at events because guests almost always bring a phone and increasingly do not carry a handbag, a wallet, or physical cards. Walking up to checkout, your guest already has the phone in hand, and it is often out and ready. That single fact changes your event economics: the phone, not the card, is your point of sale.
I cannot help mentioning events, because this is where the friction is most visible and most fixable. The guest who is ready to pay but cannot find a card is a guest you can lose at the last step, after all the work it took to get them in the room. A digital wallet turns that last step into a tap.
And the timing is everything at an event. The moment a guest is most ready to give is often the exact moment they cannot find a card, the line at checkout starts to build, or the program has moved on to the next ask. Friction at that moment does not just cost you one gift. It cools the energy in the room that you spent months of planning to build, and that energy is much harder to get back than a card number is to enter.
Preauthorization captures a guest's card before they need to pay, either ahead of the event or on arrival, so checkout becomes frictionless. Before the event, reminders by text and email can let guests sign up for the silent auction or the raffle and save a card on file. Some guests will catch the option to save a card at registration and some will not, which is why the reminders and the pre-populated guest experience matter so much.
At the event, BetterUnite uses Stripe to offer a few ways to preauthorize. There is tap-to-preauthorize, where the person checking guests in holds out their phone and the guest lays a credit card on top of it to preauthorize. There is also a Stripe reader, where a guest can walk up and use a digital wallet to preauthorize with no typing and not even a zip code. The goal across online giving, mobile, and events is exactly the same: remove the friction so the decision to give is the only thing the donor has to do.
The payoff shows up later in the night. When a card is already on file, a guest can win an auction item, raise a paddle, or buy a raffle ticket without stopping to pay each time, and you are not chasing anyone for a card at the end. The transaction fades into the background and the giving moves to the front, which is exactly where you want a guest's attention during your program.
Digital wallets are changing recurring giving by becoming a leading way donors set up and sustain monthly gifts, alongside credit cards. Recurring giving used to arrive mostly as checks or as bank-to-bank transfers, the old electronic fund transfers and ACH. Now we see far more credit card and digital wallet recurring giving, and that shift has real consequences for how you enroll and keep monthly donors.
The practical takeaway is that wallet-based recurring enrollment needs to be just as smooth as a one-time wallet gift. If a donor can become a monthly sustainer in a single tap from their phone, you remove the friction at the exact moment they are most willing to commit. The same wallets that lift one-time completion also lift the rate at which donors say yes to giving every month, which is the highest-value yes you can earn.
Add wallet giving by enabling it on your donation pages and at event check-in, then minimizing the fields around it so the wallet's speed is not undone by a long form. Confirm your platform supports Apple Pay and Google Pay online and supports wallet-based preauthorization on site, because the two settings solve different moments in the donor's day.
Then protect the speed you just bought. Keep the first transaction short and let stewardship gather the rest of the donor's information over time. A one-tap gift followed by a thoughtful thank-you beats a complete donor record you never collected because the donor abandoned the form. And wherever you offer a wallet, offer the monthly option right beside it, so the easiest gift to make and the most valuable gift to make are the same single tap.
Are digital wallet donations secure?
Yes. Wallet payments run on the same payment infrastructure as cards and avoid exposing the card number during entry. On BetterUnite this runs through Stripe.
Do digital wallets really increase donations?
The report's finding is that fewer clicks lead to higher give rates, and wallets are the clearest way to cut clicks, both online and at the event checkout table.
Can guests preauthorize a card before an event?
Yes. With reminders by text and email, guests can save a card on file when they register or sign up for the silent auction or raffle, so checkout is already handled by the time they arrive.
Turn on digital wallet payments online and build preauthorization into your next event so guests never have to hunt for a card.
Email support@betterunite.com to see tap-to-preauthorize and the Stripe reader in action.
Leya Simmons
Co-founder & CEO | BetterUnite
The Co-founder and CEO of BetterUnite, a platform supporting thousands of nonprofits, she brings a unique lens to the sector, shaped by 15+ years as a private art dealer and gallery owner, board leadership at organizations like the Austin Museum of Art and the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and her own experience navigating nonprofit fundraising as board president of Community Yoga Austin. A yoga teacher, a female tech executive, and a mother of five, she is passionate about equipping nonprofits with the tools they need to do more with less.