Select your donation amount in email. Does it work?

Below is an experiment run by GetUp on selecting donation amounts in emails, that did not show a positive effect. 

Background

GetUp has seen numerous other online campaigning organisations employ the technique of giving email recipients the option of selecting their donation amount in the email before clicking through to the donation page. GetUp has never previously done this, and we have conducted two experiments to see if we could find an improvement in donations if we implemented this feature.

Hypothesis

If email recipients are able to select exactly how much money they wish to donate from within the email, it may increase clicks or donations.

Structure of experiment – experiment one

The first experiment was on an email sent to our entire list in New South Wales regarding changes to NSW electoral funding legislation. Half of the list was sent a standard email with text hyperlinked asking people to donate without specifying an amount, and linking to a standard page. The other half of the list was sent an email which included graphic for the five standard donation options. The buttons were pure CSS, not images, so wouldn’t have affected the open rate.

Structure of experiment – experiment two

The second experiment was on an email sent to the large majority of the Great Barrier Reef list regarding the campaign to convince Australian banks to not invest in the Abbot Point project. The list was split into three arts. One third was sent a ‘control’ email that only contained a standard link to the donation form. The other two versions both offered donation links for specific donation amounts: one in the form of hyperlinked text, and the other in the form of hyperlinked buttons.

Results

So far, we have not identified any advantage in providing specific donation amount links in emails.

Experiment one

For experiment one, there was massive decline in the clicks/opens rate for the variation, from 5.3% to 3.1%. The rate of donations-per-click increased slightly, from 54.9% to 58%, and the money raised per click increased from $10.05 to $13.89.

Despite the average donation size increasing, and the average money raised per click increasing, the amount of money raised for a similar number of opens dropped by 23%. Examining the breakdown of donations based on the dollar amount, there was a proportional decline in number of donations at the $5, $10, $20 and $50 amounts, and a massive drop-off in the number of $3 donations given. There was no drop-off in the number of $30 or $100 donations, which were the most expensive options given in the email.

This suggests that providing the donation buttons reduced the amount of small donations given, in particular at the very low $3 level. Thus the decline in the total sum raised is less dramatic than the decline in clicks and donations would suggest, but it is still less.

Experiment two

For our second experiment, we considered the possibility that members may have been confused by the use of images as ‘buttons’ – something GetUp has never done before. So we ran two experiments – one using hyperlinked buttons, and the other using hyperlinked text.

The number of opens was very similar for all three options. Variation B (the email including hyperlinked text for each donation amount) produced 10.1% more clicks, but this increase in clicks did not translate to any increase in the number of donations, the total dollars raised, or the average donation size.

The three versions have very similar statistics, and there is no clear winner or loser in terms of statistical significance.

Conclusion

At the moment, we haven’t been able to identify any added value in providing specific donation amounts in emails.

Our first experiment produced a significant decline in the amount of clicks, and then the amount of money raised from the email with the options available. The second experiment did not repeat this unusual result, so it is too soon to conclude that donation amount links have a negative impact on the results of an email, but it again did not demonstrate a positive impact.

It is possible that there could be other ways to structure this process which would produce more benefits, such as integrating the option with the ‘quick donate’ system, to allow people to effectively make the donation just by clicking on a dollar amount.