Does Your A/B (Testing) Need to Meet C and D?

What do 127,000 experiments over five years from a variety of sectors, including fundraising, tell us about what’s required to run better experiments?  First, let’s define better: higher chance of winning and bigger uplift, which creates a multiplier for expected impact; the % chance of winning * likely uplift = expected impact. Here’s our take […]

What is GPT’s Personality?

Can a machine have a Personality?  Well, it can be instructed to produce copy that matches certain traits and with guidance, does this quite well. A machine can be programmed to identify and match or mimic the dominant trait of a human on the other side of a text or chatbot conversation.  This mirroring technique […]

Urgency and Crying Wolf

The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a cautionary tale of urgency messaging.  If I’ve read it once, I’ve read it a million (ish) times.  Urgency is critical to get donors to take action now.  Is it really that simple?   When might urgency messaging backfire?  Or maybe there is just a better motivator than urgency to prompt […]

Open, Keep, Convert: Mastering the Charity Mail Journey

The DonorVoice Behavioral Science Team is calling for applications to participate in a direct mail innovation project.  Details are below. Simply Click here to express interest and the team will follow up accordingly. Overview Your best “digital” donors are your direct mail recipients.  And still, almost all your charity mail goes directly in the trash, […]

The Doom Loop

If it bleeds it leads.  This media cliche begs the question, is the media feeding us negativity we swallow like bad medicine or are they giving us a spoonful of our preferred elixir? The Russian news site, City Reporter, did an experiment for an entire day publishing nothing but positive stories.  The result?  They lost […]

6 Minutes and 46 Seconds To Be Reminded and Inspired

Human vs. Machine

We humans built the machines so the “vs.” doesn’t properly credit our maker status bona fides.  Having said that, machine is often much faster and yes, better. Here’s another instance that feels pretty close to home.  This experiment used professional copywriters to draft ad campaign copy, 100 words or fewer, for an NGO for four […]

When is Less More?

Facebook is nothing if not obsessed with users using the app more frequently and for longer durations.  App notifications are like crack for this hamster wheel and so the idea of sending fewer seems anathema. But this is exactly what their data science team did because user satisfaction surveys showed a preference for fewer notifications. […]

People Don’t Give Because We Ask

Just those first few notes and I’m transported to 1981 and formative years, memories and emotions.  It creates a physical response, those music chills. Journey’s, Don’t Stop Believin’ is iconic for me but here’s the paradox: you only hear the music because Journey plays, but you don’t feel the connection because they play. You feel […]

Best of 2023: Just Make Sure They Spell My Name Right

Phineas T. Barnum, the 19th-century American showman and circus owner, reportedly said, “I don’t care what they say about me; just make sure they spell my name right.”  It’s a great line and often, it’s true. Exposure to the brand increases awareness and it tends to accrue to the positive.  We’re predisposed to have a […]