Faux deadlines are a stock in trade for online fundraising.

“Faux” because most organizations will  take every penny that comes in past the deadline and even if there is a match thrown in to juice the offer  – e.g. give by Date X and your gift will be matched.

But does it work?  And “work” should always be in “quotation marks  ” because it depends on how we define success.  Short term, non-sustaining blips (they’re rarely spikes) can be driven by external pressure tactics that win the battle (i.e. response rate) only to lose the war (repeat giving).

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But, does the faux deadline…the countdown timers …and the doomsday devices even get us a short term “win”?   The short answer is probably not.  And if you do use a deadline, longer is better at reducing the number of small donations but has no effect on the percentage of people who give.

Let’s get out our shovels and dig a bit deeper on the “why”.  Why might a deadline work?

A standard model of behavior – let’s call it the old school version – would argue that donors have mental, transaction costs that make giving today more/less mentally expensive depending on the person.  If the email ask lands in my inbox on a Tuesday afternoon the transaction cost of time is high.  If you impose a deadline that I have to reply within the hour then the chance of me doing it is near zero even if I love the organization or cause.

A longer deadline – say 30 days – would, in theory and per the old school model, give more people more days to give at a time with low, mental transaction costs.  In this old school world the donations would come in rather evenly over the 30 days as different people find different days/times that work for them.

A less old-school model argues that people aren’t really sensitized to their time-based preferences, they just procrastinate and over-estimate the likelihood that they’ll carry out a task in the future.  In this world, some things are never done;  not because people have chosen not to do them but because they have chosen not to do them now.  This procrastination argument would argue for shorter deadlines and seeing a spike in giving right before the deadline expires.

In a series of real-world experiments with deadline solicitations and a matching gift as a kicker, the results all pointed to a single, simple reality – the now or never effect.

The Reality of the Now or Never Effect

In the digital world (email and text) either people donate immediately after being asked or they don’t donate at all.  The imposing of deadlines doesn’t change this, nor does the length of the deadline – the distribution of response is the same.

The deadline length does have a effect on gift size, namely shorter deadlines equal smaller donations.  This is almost certainly because these gifts are externally motivated (which is low quality motivation) creating a sense of pressure and/or guilt.  They give a lesser amount to address the external forces and aren’t going to feel good about it.

This exact same phenomenon plays out in sustainer asks (TM or F2F) with the minimum amount (regardless of the objective price/ask amount) the fundraiser is able to accept often having the worse retention than asks with higher price points.

Kevin