Boost your fundraising by up to 5% in 10 minutes: dollar handle order and default amounts

At Raisely, we see ourselves as part of a community of fundraisers working to improve the wellbeing of people and planet. We’re excited to share the insights we have that can support fundraising and help organisations have a greater impact.

We’re always thinking about how we can optimise the donor experience on Raisely. Recently, we’ve been doing some deep work to fine tune our donation forms (watch this space).

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Back to basics

As part of this, we wanted to go back to basics: what’s the best way to present donation amounts on a donation form? We wanted to know:

• should amounts be presented from smallest to largest (ascending) or largest to smallest (descending)
• should a default amount be selected

These are two of the most fundamental parts of the donor experience and we wanted to make sure the default settings on Raisely campaigns are right.

We spent a bit of time researching to see if we could find a definitive answer (shoutout to Google Scholar) and we couldn’t. So, we did one of our favourite things and ran an experiment.

Into the lab

We built an experiment that randomly presented one of four variations to users visiting a subset of Raisely sites. These variants were:

• Ascending order, no default amount selected
• Ascending order, default amount selected
• Descending order, no default amount selectedDescending order, no default amount selected
• Descending order, default amount selected

There are thousands of charities and organisations using Raisely for fundraising at any given moment. Many of these organisations have opted in to Raisely Experiments which gives us permission to run tests like we’ve done here. This enabled us to present the experiment to over 100,000 users and track over 20,000 donations.

It’s important to note, organisations using Raisely continue to own their own data. Raisely has access to data for the purposes of running and building the platform. It’s your data, not ours and we take that seriously. That’s why we share results like this with you.

Presenting amounts in ascending order with no default is the way to go

Let’s cut to the chase, what did we see? Well, the differences were small but there was a clear trend that presenting amounts in ascending order had higher conversion rates and higher average donation amounts.

Having a default amount selected was associated with a small decrease in conversion rate and lower average donation amount (these differences were often very small).

Let’s take a look at these in more detail.

Conversion rate

Presenting amounts in ascending order was associated with around half percentage point increase in conversion rate, compared with presenting amounts in descending order.

This isn’t huge: it reflects one additional donor for every two hundred people who visit your site. But, every little bit helps, right?

Presentations without default amounts selected also had slightly higher conversion rates compared to those with default donation amounts (across both decreasing and increasing orders).

Average fundraising

Presenting amounts in ascending order was associated with around 1% increase in average donation compared with presenting amounts in descending order. This reflects roughly 50c on a $50 donation.

There was no clear pattern comparing the average fundraising between variants with default amounts with variants without default amounts.

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Putting it all together

When we combine the differences in conversion rates and average fundraising, the overall difference in expected fundraising from a new user is a little larger.

In total, we expect presentations in ascending order to raise approximately 4% more than presentations in descending order. We also expect presentations with no default amount selected to perform roughly 1% better than than those with default amount selected.

We don’t want to get too carried away, these differences are small but they provide some clarity to questions that are important to consider when designing a campaign. They also help us build the most effective donor experience. Stay tuned for more experiment results soon.