The easiest way to increase advocacy conversion is to remove most of the advocacy.

Ask people whether they oppose animal cruelty, want children protected or think politicians should stop doing the obviously terrible thing described in the headline. They click “Add My Name,” and congratulations, another committed activist has joined the movement, or not.

Agreeing with a proposition designed to be nearly impossible to disagree with feels like we’ve lost the plot.

In one experiment that made pledging to donate the easy, default choice, the pledge rate jumped from 2% to 3.7%.

Nearly twice as many pledges.  Victory?   Turns out the extra pledgers recruited by the default were less likely to follow through, and resulted in no statistically significant increase in completed donations.

A faux petition is not technically a default, but it performs the same bit of behavioral surgery by lowering the threshold for being counted.  We see this in our advocacy testing and research.

The hand-raiser petition produces much higher initial conversion. The person enters a name and email, clicks a button and is welcomed into the database as if they just chained themselves to the courthouse steps.

The genuine petition asks more. The person provides geographic information, is matched to an elected representative and sends an actual message to that representative. Conversion drops substantially.

If the dashboard ends there, the hand-raiser wins but downstream, the verdict reverses.

• People completing the genuine petition show stronger Identity fit with the organization and
• Greater Commitment, our measure of relationship strength.
• They convert to donors at higher rates and produce greater lifetime value.
• The hand-raiser audience tends to be lower SES, less aligned with the organization’s Identity and much less valuable as a donor cohort.

The extra work involved in a genuine petition is doing at least two jobs.

First, it selects. Someone willing to identify their legislator and send a consequential message probably cared more before arriving.  The friction reveals innate motivation.

Second, the action may reinforce the person’s connection to the cause. A freely chosen, meaningful act becomes a reinforcing mechanism on the Identity/mission linkage that initiated the behavior – a virtuous self reinforcing loop.

Operationally, this means removing every ounce of friction can remove the very information that distinguishes a future donor from a passing click.

Just be forewarned, Volume Machine Fundraising sees the smaller pile and assumes something went wrong. Sometimes the smaller pile contains the people you were trying to find.

Kevin