If you’re a fundraiser or campaigner, you should find plenty of food for thought if you read between the lines of this recent NPR story, “Gamifying the system to create better behavior.” It certainly caught my attention when I heard it!

The story highlights the use of rewards to encourage specific behaviors (in this case, rewarding people for driving the speed limit by entering them into a contest to win a prize or encouraging people to lose weight by putting them on national TV), but they also address a hierarchy to rewards:
(more…)

Not sure how much your online supporters are worth? Thinking there may be a better way to maximize their value?  Frustrated by internal barriers to multichannel integration?

If so, this webinar is for you. Multichannel donors are gold. Annual revenues are often 4x that of direct mail-only donors, with higher retention rates and much better net.  Simply supplementing an email with a text message or a mail piece (or both!) can dramatically improve response rates. This session is for those who are ready to break down the barriers and effectively conduct multichannel marketing. (more…)

Download the PDF

Over a year ago, M+R released the results of a test in which we dropped the price of membership with a major nonprofit from $35 to $25 for a limited time for subscribers who had never become members.  We teamed up with two University of Maryland economists to roll out the offer and analyze the results.

Reducing the membership to $25 and – here’s the key! – telling supporters it was a special discount raised just a hair more, but it got more people donating. This tactic reduced the average gifts, but increased response rates, securing first-time gifts from more people. Check out the full results from the original study.

But there was still a big question hanging over our heads: Would the donors who gave to the discounted $25 membership perform as well in the long-term, or were they just fair weather fans who would always need a special offer to get them to open their wallets?

We took a deep dive into this nonprofit’s data to find out, looking at 18 months worth of online and offline giving for the donors to the $35 and $25 offers from the original test.
(more…)

Download the PDF

With direct mail and other fundraising channels hitting the skids, nonprofits are looking to boost online revenue in any way they can – trying out new tactics to get that all-important first donation from non-members.

This one might have crossed your mind: “What if we lower the minimum cost of membership?”  M+R and two economists from the University of Maryland partnered with a major nonprofit to run a test.  In an email appeal to people who had never become members, we reduced the minimum membership amount from $35 to $25.

What did we find out?  Framing is everything. (more…)