Canadian Taxpayers Federation

How breaking down your campaign goal impacted revenue

Experiment ID: #84157

Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Experiment Summary

Ended On: 02/04/2022

As a part of a campaign designed to raise money to run radio ads about a new legislative initiative, the Canadian Taxpayer Federation wanted to better understand how best to ask their donors and subscribers to contribute to their campaign.

In an attempt to do something radically different than how they have asked in the past for short-term, project-based fundraising goals, they decided to break their goal down into smaller amounts and publish the number of gifts that it would take at that smaller target goal per donor to make the larger fundraising goal seem more realistic.

Research Question

We believe that breaking your campaign goal down into smaller target gift amounts for prospective donors will achieve an increase in donor conversion rate and revenue.

Design

C: Control

T1: Treatment #1

Results

	Treatment Name	Revenue per Visitor	Relative Difference	Confidence	Average Gift
C:	Control	$0.12			$48.12
T1:	Treatment #1	$0.21	81.1%	100.0%	$42.78

This experiment was validated using 3rd party testing tools. Based upon those calculations, a significant level of confidence was met so these experiment results are valid.

Flux Metrics Affected

The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:

0% increase in traffic
× 103.7% increase in conversion rate
× 11.1% decrease in average gift
81.1% increase in revenue

Key Learnings

With a 99.9% level of confidence, we observed an increase in revenue of +81.1%!

We also observed an increase of +103.7% in the donor conversion rate metric (which also validated with a 100% level of confidence).

Our hypothesis as to why the treatment worked so much better than the control is because large fundraising goals make smaller dollar donors feel like the problem or burden to achieve that goal will need to be solved by a donor with much, much larger capacity to give a really large gift. Additionally, it could also make the small-dollar donor feel shame that the smaller gift that they’re capable of giving today isn’t “good enough” to help the organization—and because of that—they decide to not give a gift at all.

The breakdown of the larger fundraising goal into a smaller gift amount not only drove more than twice the number of gifts created by the control experience but what’s really interesting is that the average gift between the two segments only decreased by 11% when compared to the control segment.

Finally, it’s worth noting a few more observations, which include:

43% of the treatment donors gave more than what they were asked for and were worth 79% of the funds raised in the segment.
42% of the treatment donors gave what they were asked for and were worth 17% of the funds raised in the segment.
Only 16% of the treatment donors gave less than the amount they were asked for and were only worth 5% of the funds raised in the segment.
While the control segment drove a higher percentage (21.5%) of donors at/above $100 when compared to the treatment (17.6%), the overall number of $100+ donors increased by 65% within the treatment segment.

Our recommendation is to use this campaign goal breakdown approach moving forward for all big fundraising campaigns.

More experimentation could be done in terms of setting daily goals for the campaign or making the ask amount to an amount that is relevant to a donor’s most recent gift (or highest gift) or setting a smaller number of donors that need to achieve a gift smaller gift amount (and note that you’ll combine those gifts with others to achieve the overall goal).

Experiment Documented by Greg Colunga

Greg Colunga is Chief Operating Office at NextAfter.

Question about experiment #84157

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.