We’re celebrating a huge milestone this week…we’ve officially logged 1000 experiments in our online fundraising research library. But the number itself is not what we’re most excited about.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible to be able to say to someone that we’ve documented 1000 experiments that are decoding what works to inspire more donations and increase generosity.
Ultimately though, it’s the learnings those 1000 experiments represent that get us jumping up and down.
Before I go any further, let’s just all take a moment to celebrate, because you’re an essential part of this too (more on that in a minute).
All right. Now that we’ve gotten that out of our system, let’s look at the experiment that put us over the edge.
The 1000th Experiment
The 1000th online fundraising experiment was conducted with Boys Town – an organization working to change how the world cares for children, families, and communities by helping those suffering from abuse, addiction, abandonment and violence to reach their potential.
In this experiment, Boys Town was running a Facebook advertising campaign to try and acquire new email addresses and grow their file. They were offering a free 5-week email series to help parents learn how to handle toddler tantrums.
The original ad used copy that we would consider organizational-centric. By that, I mean that the copy was focused around organizational goals, rather than the goals of the end user.
Here’s the ad:
We created a new Facebook ad to test. This time, the copy was more donor-centric. Rather than say things like “We’ve pulled together…”, the copy used words like “you” and “your.” The value presented was focused on what the recipient would get out of it – not the organization.
Here’s the treatment:
The goal of this experiment was to drive more traffic to the landing page where someone could sign up for the email series. To validate this experiment, we looked at clicks.
After running the experiment for 2 weeks, we compared the difference. The treatment ad (the one with donor-centric copy) saw a 27.7% increase in clicks to the landing page. The treatment was a clear winner, but what did we learn?
Empathy, Marketing, and Online Fundraising Go Hand-in-Hand
Whenever we run an experiment like this, we’re always looking for the larger principle. Every single experiment that we add to our library helps define and refine a bigger picture of what makes donors give.
This experiment points towards the idea of empathetic marketing. Let’s define empathy really quick:
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. – Dictionary.com
When we try to understand and share the feelings of our donors and potential donors, we start to see our copy, our messaging, our advertising, and every other marketing and fundraising channel differently.
In this case, by putting ourselves in the shoes of the people seeing the ad for the free email series, we realized that there wasn’t much value being communicated about why this offer was important and relevant to the end user.
By tweaking our messaging to be more empathetic, we saw a significant improvement in our results.
Brian Carroll of Markempa was the first person to introduce me to the term empathetic marketing, and he gave a talk on it at the 2017 Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Summit.
If you want to dig deeper, you can watch his whole talk for free.
This idea of empathetic marketing applies well beyond advertising. Over the course of 1000 experiments, we’ve seen this concept play out on donation pages, email fundraising, and more.
Lessons We’ve Learned from 1000 Experiments
Empathy is at the heart of nearly every major learning and breakthrough that we’ve found throughout 1000 online fundraising experiments.
Everything from crafting a more effective value proposition, to designing a higher converting donation page, to lifting revenue from your email appeals all points back to this central idea of having empathy for your donors.
I think you’ll see this trend if we look at some of the most significant learnings from these 1000 experiments:
Never Assume that Someone Understands Why They Should Give to You
The most significant factor in influencing some to click, sign-up, register, or donate is always the value proposition. If your donor doesn’t know why their gift matters, they’re not going to donate.
We’ve seen this play out in countless experiments, but let’s look at one that illustrates this very clearly…
In experiment #6623 with Illinois Policy Institute, their original donation page had virtually no copy on it. There was nothing to answer the donor’s fundamental question: Why should I give to you, rather than some other organization, or maybe not at all?
When our donation pages have no copy, we’re essentially assuming that the potential donor is already fully convinced that they should donate. But if your donation page conversion rate is anything less than 100%, this assumption can’t be true.
We tested this original donation page against a new one that clearly explained why a donor should give. The new page saw a 150% increase in donations.
Here’s a quick video breaking down the experiment:
Do you see how empathy comes into play on a donation page? We have to craft our page keeping in mind how the donor is perceiving it.
People Give to People, Not Email Machines
This is the golden rule we live by when it comes to email fundraising.
Just think about your own email habits. When you wake up in the morning and check your email on your phone, which emails do you actually want to open? The vast majority of the time, you’re going to open emails from real human beings that you know and trust.
Now, you might be saying, “Nathan, I live a healthy lifestyle and don’t immediately stare at my phone when I wake up.”
For that, I applaud you.
But the same concept applies when you get to work. Are you more inclined to open the email from your colleague, or the email that looks like it’s from a salesperson wanting you to buy a new tool or service?
There are a ton of factors that go into the psychology of deciding which emails to open and which ones to delete. While we don’t have the time or space in this post to go into detail, Jeff Giddens held a webinar on humanizing your email appeals that’s really helpful in understanding how to break-through in the inbox, get your emails opened and read by motivated donors, and grow your revenue.
You can watch the whole webinar here.
If you don’t have time to watch the webinar, here are some tips to keep in mind next time you write a fundraising email. I’ve linked a blog post about each tip if you want to read more.
- Build trust with your donors by using a personal sender name. Read more
- Use personalization to help build a real relationship. Read more
- Write enough copy to thoroughly explain your value proposition. Read more
- Only use images if they’re going to strengthen the value of your appeal. Read more
- Delete all of your fancy email templates. You wouldn’t send it to your friend, so don’t send it to your donor. Read more
- Talk like a real human being, not a marketing robot. Read more
Are you seeing the trend? Email fundraising is about relationships. And healthy relationships require empathy.
No One Goes Online to Give. They Go Online to Get.
Some people really don’t like hearing this claim. Here’s what a fundraiser had to say when I made this claim in a Facebook ad:
Obviously, people donate online. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have a job. So please hear me out before you rake me over the coals like this fundraiser….
The general reason people go online, particularly on Facebook, is to get something for themselves. This includes updates on family and friends, articles, blogs, news (fake and real), games, tools, resources, etc.
People don’t get on Facebook with the purpose of giving away their money.
As a result, using a channel like Facebook to try and convince someone to donate to your organization directly is most often going to be fruitless.
We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the user; we have to have empathy. Since a Facebook user is looking to get something, we can offer them something of value for free in exchange for an email address.
By doing so, we can get the user out of the Facebook timeline and create an opportunity to make a donation ask that won’t fall on deaf ears.
We’ve spent $3 million on Facebook advertising over the past 4 years, and conducted 300+ Facebook fundraising experiments to craft this donor acquisition strategy. And every single step is outlined in a free 11-session course called Turning Facebook Likes Into Donors.
This course so far has helped over 1800 fundraisers learn how to effectively acquire new revenue using Facebook and other similar channels. And none of this would be possible without the power of optimization, testing, and experimentation.
1000 Experiments is Great. But It’s Only a Starting Place.
“Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.” – Peter Drucker
We live by this quote at NextAfter. So much so that we put it on a t-shirt we gave away at the 2017 Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Summit (You should come to this, by the way).
1000 experiments is a great number, but we can’t stop here. There’s so much more to be learned. And in order to keep pressing forward and discovering what makes donors give, we need other fundraisers to embrace optimization.
The real power of 1000 experiments is not in the number itself. And it’s not just in the learnings. The power is in the people that it represents, day in and day out, who are testing and optimizing to discover what works.
And when nonprofits work hard to discover what works, the revenue growth that follows has the power to provide food to children around the world who are starving. It has the power to provide training and support to families that are trapped in a cycle of poverty. It has the power to provide health services and medication to people in desperate health crises.
Optimization has the power to change the world. And 1000 experiments is only the very beginning.
GREAT