Campaigns switching to our new donation form are seeing a 48% increase in fundraising

Martin Burgess -

At the start of this year, we rebuilt our donation form from the ground up. We ran more experiments than ever to create a beautiful form that helps you raise even more.

For the last three months, campaigns on Raisely have been switching over to the new form. Now we’ve had hundreds of thousands of users on pages that have the new form, it’s time to see how it’s performing.

We won’t bury the good news. Campaigns that have switched to our new form are seeing a 48% increase in fundraising per unique visitor to their page. This is a change from $6.15 to $9.11 per unique visitor.

If you’re anything like us, you might be skeptical of this result. We couldn’t quite believe it when we first ran our analysis. We take our responsibility to share accurate information with our customers and the fundraising community seriously. In short, we don’t want to BS you.

In the rest of this post we’re going to walk through the data behind this result and changes that go into it.

Our analysis

Raisely’s a flexible platform that scales with organisations. This means we have a wide variety of campaigns running at any time. Some are massive campaigns with big teams that raise millions of dollars. Some are local campaigns with one person behind the scenes.

We want to make sure the changes we’re seeing represent a typical campaign and aren’t overly influenced by some of the large campaigns we have running. To achieve this, we use sophisticated modelling (specifically a technique called generalised linear mixed models 🤓) that controls for each campaign individually and measures the overall impact.

This analysis includes data from 130,000 users across 49 campaigns. Each of these campaigns switched from our previous form to our new V3 form. This means they had recent donations through our previous donation form and donations through the new V3 form.

What makes up the 48% increase in fundraising?

There are two overall metrics that contribute to 48% increase in fundraising for our new donation form:

  1. conversion rate: our new donation form is converting 20% better than our previous form
  2. average donation: fundraising per transaction is up 24% from $50.83 to $62.93 per transaction

Combined these two factors add up to a 48% increase in fundraising per unique visitor for Raisely campaigns using the new form.

A big part of the increase in average donation is a large number of donors who are signing up for a regular giving subscription. When we assess fundraising for these donors we multiply their regular donation by 12. This is a conservative estimate - our research shows that the typical regular giving subscription lasts for 24 months (but some last much, much longer). We’ll explore this more in the next section.

Nudging donors towards regular giving

We know the impact regular giving can have for organisations using Raisely and we wanted it to be front and centre in our new donation form.

A huge number of donors either don’t know they can donate regularly or don’t know the impact it can have for your organisation. We wanted our new donation form to change that.

Two key elements of the new donation form help donors consider regular giving:

  1. regular giving nudge on the first page to tell them giving monthly has a greater impact
  2. a whole new upsell step that doubles uptake of regular giving with no overall impact on conversion

These changes are making a difference. Overall fundraising through regular giving is up 66% per unique visitor, made up through:

  • regular giving conversion rate is up 39% from 0.8% to 1.1%
  • average regular giving donation is up 19% from $23.64 to $28.21

When we run a direct A/B test on the regular giving upsell we saw it doubled regular giving per unique visitor (see details here). The results here are slightly different because we’re looking at a smaller subset of campaign that have moved from V2 to V3. Some of these campaigns may have been using the upsell in V2 before switching, softening the impact of V3.

Delightful details that build donor confidence

Alongside increases in regular giving, the new donation form also has features that build donor confidence throughout the donation flow. In particular:

  • donor specific payment logos before they start the form
  • beautiful transitions
  • visual cues to emphasise their donation is secure
  • a clearer layout of donation amounts
  • no default donation amount selected

These changes mean that our new form has increased performance for one-off donations as well as regular giving. We’re seeing:

  • 19% increases in conversion rates for one-off donations - this means even with our upsell step we’re not seeing a drop off in one-off donations.
  • 19% increases in average donation - donors have confidence to donate more

When these increases are multiplied together it creates a 42% increase in one-off fundraising per unique visitor. All these changes were consistent across mobile and desktop traffic.

Make the switch and see the benefits for yourself

Hopefully, by now, you’re as excited as us about our new donation form. If you want to give it a go here are two things you can do right now to try it out:

  • if you’re not on Raisely, book a demo to see how Raisely can be the all-in-one fundraising platform for your organisation
  • if you’re already using Raisely, you can switch any existing campaign or create a new campaign with the new donation form now

If you have any questions about the data we’ve shared - please reach out. We’d love to discuss.