What Really Works for End-Of-Year Fundraising?
Guest article! See below for the latest from our friends at PowerThru Consulting, and note that this article originally appeared on the PowerThru blog.
What Really Works for End-Of-Year Fundraising?
Ah, December. In addition to all of the usual stress the average person faces — wondering how to avoid putting on those extra holiday pounds, and get just the right holiday gifts without going into a “Santa Claus is Coming to Town is making me hate Bruce Springsteen right now” rage at the mall — the online organizer has another stress to deal with. How do you put together just the right series of end-of-year fundraising emails, to raise a significant chunk of money from your supporters who are hopefully in a giving spirit – or can be enticed, worn down or guilted into being so?
There’s a ton of strategies to accomplish that. But savvy online organizers know that the only truly good strategy is one that’s been tested to prove that it works better than other strategies with your particular list of supporters. Doing something like subject line testing to see whether one subject line or another gets more people to open your emails is pretty easy, and commonly used by groups with even small lists. Unfortunately, organizations often lack a large enough list size of former donors to perform statistically-significant tests to see what will make your former donors give more or less. (According to M & R Strategies 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, the average donation rate on an email is .08%, meaning you have to email to tens of thousands of people just to get tens of donations — which is what you’ll need to see an significant difference from one approach to another).
At PowerThru though, we do have clients with large enough list sizes for us to do significantly significant tests. They were game for having us try to maximize their fundraising revenue, by testing our assumptions during the initial stage so we could use the approaches that proved to work the best for the remainder of the campaign.
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