Are you ready for #GivingTuesday?

Having recently reviewed a bunch of #GivingTuesday emails from different charities I’m sure as a sector we can do better. As a behavioral scientist, three observations stood out.

• The majority of nonprofits are using a match offer for #GivingTuesday. I won’t argue against such an offer here. We’ve covered this many times before.
• Most make use of urgency– but nowhere near its full potential.
• There’s enormous missed opportunity by not using additional behavioural science principles.

Here are four crucial behavioural science principles that are either not optimised or are missing altogether:

1. Urgency visualisation

A picture is worth a thousand words. In your case it might also be worth many more dollars.

Creating a sense of urgency helps tackle procrastination. Most #GivingTuesday appeals use urgency language e.g. ‘soon’, ‘hurry’, ‘time is running out’. But, the power of images, or other visual elements, is either neglected or completely forgotten.

In the dozens of emails I reviewed, I found only one using a live countdown to further enhance this sense of urgency. So whether it’s a picture or a gif, a clock or an hourglass, don’t forget to add a visual element.

2. Exceptional occurrence or expense

We tend to categorise money into different mental accounts. In some cases, these represent actual bank accounts e.g. current, savings, pension, kids’ college fund etc.

Once money is put into one (mental) account, we’re reluctant to use it to cover the needs of another. For example, most people wouldn’t take money from their savings account to pay for a night out. But when something doesn’t fit neatly into an existing budget category e.g. birthday presents, we are more flexible in terms of how much we’ll spend on it.

Why is this relevant to Giving Tuesday? Minor differences in the way a charity frames a donation appeal, as either a regular occurrence or an exceptional one, can make a big difference in how likely people are to donate and how much. Have a look at the two posters below advertising  the Alzheimer’s walk – you can read the full study here.

Framing the walk as an exceptional event (“only once a year”), rather than a recurring one (“held annually”), increased response rate and average gift. What is more, the exceptional framing made people think less about the effect the donation might have on their budgets.

In other words, more people gave, and they gave more and worried less about the expense. The same kind of framing could be tested for #GivingTuesday, which also happens once a year.

3. Goal proximity & visualisation

People are more motivated to act when there is a target, but even more so when some progress has been made towards that target. The greater the progress made, the more people respond,  with the majority of them starting to flood in after about 70% of the goal has been reached.

In 2016, we set out to improve responses to Project Hope‘s #GivingTuesday email. The previous year, the appeal announced a goal of $25,000 and had brought in $21, 581.

It was the highest performing digital effort outside of disaster response but we thought there was room for improvement.

We revised the series to focus on the goal with messaging and visuals that emphasized the progress to that goal.

The result? It brought in $30,554 – 20% above the goal.

4. Contingent framing for goal attainability

One quite interesting adaptation of the match offer is what is known as the “contingent match”. In this instance, the match will occur only if a certain percentage of people respond.  In one study, they compared this contingent match against a standard match and an offer with no match. Here are the conditions and the copy in each one:

• Control: “start a monthly gift today”
• Standard Match: “we will match all new monthly donations today”
• Contingent Match: “we will match all new monthly donations today only if X% of donors start a recurring donation today”

In the contingent match condition, they also tested different percentages that needed to be reached: 25% , 50%, 75%, 100%

This graph shows the % of people converting to a monthly gift in each condition.

The contingent match offer at 75% was the most successful. Announcing that all new monthly donations will be matched only if 75% of donors start a recurring donation today resulted in 4.73% conversion rate.

Requiring 75% of people to respond seems to be the sweet spot between something that sounds impossible (we need 100% to respond) and something that sounds unpopular (we need 25% to respond).

I’m not suggesting using a contingent match in your #GivingTuesday emails. Although it’d be an interesting and probably successful test, there are ethical, legal and practical barriers: your match will occur no matter how many people respond.

However, you could test the same language when you talk about your target to see if you can increase response rates. After announcing the goal for the day, you can test the following sentence in the body of your copy/donation page and also in the outbound email: “If 75% people who read this email give before midnight, we’ll reach our goal”.

I hope you’ve found a few ideas you can test. If so, please let us know what you found. And, if you need any more information or support on how to run these tests, please get in touch through our “Ask a Behavioural Scientist feature” on the Agitator website.

Kiki