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Want to raise more money? Try not asking. Sometimes you can raise more money through activism than you can with a fundraising appeal. We split a client’s list into four even segments, and sent an email to one segment, inviting them to sign a petition on a core issue. Another segment received a very similar email, but these readers were invited to contribute to a full-page ad in a major newspaper on the same issue. The petition appeal produced 500 signatures, and the appeal only about 10 gifts. We noticed, using WebTrends reports, that only 92 recipients of the appeal email clicked the link, and again, about 10 percent of them followed through to make a donation. So, we sent emails to the last two groups. One received the same fundraising email, as a control. The other group received the identical petition email, but after they signed the petition, they were brought to a "thank-you" page that contained the appeal for the newspaper ad. Since 500 of them saw this appeal, compared to fewer than 100 who clicked through from the fundraising email, we collected about 25 gifts this way - two and a half times more gifts than we did through the appeal. The moral of this story? Test, and look at all your relevant statistics to spot the trends that matter. March 2006 | |
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