queer ideas

Does religion make people nicer?

Take any mainstream charity and you'll find that a significant number of people on the supporter base regularly attend a place of worship.

But does that mean religious people are nicer than everyone else?

After reading Deepak Malhorta's study on religious salience, it seems the answer might be sometimes - particularly if that time happens to be a Sunday.

Professor Malhorta undertook a study that looked at the factors that might encourage participants in an online charitable auction to continue bidding.

The experiment was based on sending two different kinds of emails to the participants. The 'charitable' email included the following message...

"We hope you will continue to support this charity by keeping the bidding alive. Every extra dollar you bid in the auction helps us accomplish our very special mission."

A second email, encouraged people to bid again with a 'competitive' message...

"The competition is heating up! If you hope to win, you will have to bid again. Are you up for the challenge?"

The results showed that religious people were more likely than non-religious people to respond to an appeal 'for charity' but only on the day that they attended their place of worship. On other days of the week there was no discernible difference between the two groups.

 

The 'competitive' email was more effective on religious bidders than non-religious bidders, but there was no 'Sunday effect'.

So, in short, it seems attending a religious service primes people to respond to a request for help from a charity. That might help explain why our ads in the Sunday press normally tend to work better than those run during the week.

You can download Professor Malhotra's paper here (PDF).

The great banner sale

GRAACC is a Brazilian hospital that offers free treatment for children with cancer.

Over the last few years they have used a number of innovative approaches to raising funds. in 2011, they undertook the great banner sale.

Rather than simply ask people for money, they asked companies to donate banner space on their web sites. Instead of using them to promote the hospital, they sold the spots to other companies and individuals.

It seemed to work quite well.

When compared to their 2010 campaign, the number of donors jumped by over 2,500% and the value of their gifts increased by 260%.

You can learn more on this video...

 

And if you're interested in GRAACC's campaign for 2010, that was rather different too. They asked people to donate their whole website to the charity. Another idea that doesn't seem to have performed that badly, generating over 185,000 hits in just one day and increasing the number of supporters by 220%. Details of this are included in this video...

 

Thanks to @HayesThompson for the heads up.

The web is older and so are (some of) its users

A rather interesting statistical view of the digital landscape in Europe has just been published by comScore.

The report provides insights on content categories, trends in social networking (and the knock-on effects on email and instant messaging), with a great snapshot of what's happening in online advertising, video, search and smartphone use.

Key points worth highlighting (with a nod to the older demographic that tends to interest fundraisers) include:

• The Dutch and the British spend most time online (31.39 and 30.38 hours / month respectively).
• Europeans spend more time on Facebook than any other site.
• As you might imagine, this means social networking and photo sharing are the fastest growing things to do on the web.
• Which also means that social networking has been the main driver in the growth in display advertising.
• Email use is still growing amongst those aged 35 and over (though nowhere near as fast as social networking).
• There seems to be a shifting preference to watch fewer, longer videos online (the average length of a video is now 5.6 minutes).
• Europe-wide, smartphones account for about 30% of the mobile market.
• 28% of European Facebook users are aged over 45...

...but over 36% of LinkedIn users are in the same age group.

With the significantly older (and wealthier) profile of LinkedIn users, it makes me wonder why I hardly ever hear about it as a fundraising medium. It might not be as sexy as Facebook and Twitter, but with the right offer it could be far more successful.

I personally find LinkedIn a great source of information on attitudes to giving amongst higher-value donors. We are just starting to use it to enhance the higher-value DM appeals that we create at Bluefrog. As you can imagine, It's a great way of learning about prospects. But it's useful in a number of other ways too.

If you're new to fundraising on LinkedIn, you might find these tips or this case study useful.

I'd also suggest you download the full paper from comScore (it's available here free of charge but registration is required). You'll also find the 2010 US digital review and the 2010 mobile year in review at the same site.

What makes a good banner ad?

I can't think of any areas of fundraising where simple and engaging propositions don't work – and that includes online display ads.

And here's an example to prove it.

You've probably seen the recent fundraising campaign on Wikipedia, where they have tested a number of different creative ideas.

The current winner is 'Please read: A personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales'.

As you can see from the outcome of one of the more significant tests in this infographic from Information is Beautiful, It seems to be doing very well against some of the slightly more abstratc approaches:
 
It's a personal and direct ask from a real person – Jimmy Wales, the human face behind Wikipedia. And as you'll see, it feature a picture of Jimmy.

Nothing clever, nothing abstract, but rather relevant to the audience.

It was an approach that won when tested in Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, German and English.

If you'd like to see more, all the results of the tests are available here. The campaign is ongoing and results are regularly updated. You'll see that maybe they have something to beat the Jimmy ad - though it's early days.

You can also find out what landing page worked best (hint: it's one where all superfluous links have been removed and offers the choice of gift amount and giving by PayPal or Credit card - but you knew that already didn't you?). You'll see it uses a long copy approach and the form is on the right hand side. I'd also consider using an image here as well with a traditional charity appeal.

With thanks again to @daria for the heads up on this on Facts are the most stubborn things under the sun.