When we think of the “giving season” it is easy to imagine scenes from old holiday movies. A volunteer dressed in festive attire stands in front of a shopping mall as passersby drop dollar bills into a donation bucket. However, in reality, a large share of donations received this year will not be in person at all. According to NonProfits Source, an SEO agency for nonprofits, The problem with online donations? In the street, six in 10 people will stop to talk to a fundraiser. In the digital world, a mere 0.08 percent of visitors to fundraising websites actually end up donating. So, when a visitor does reach the donation page, there is only a split-second opportunity for nonprofits to get things right.

Successful street fundraisers are engaging, motivational, and persuasive—quickly tuning into the emotional and cognitive needs of potential donors once they have caught their initial attention. Nonprofits need to recreate this experience in the digital world. But how?

Co-authors Frank Bilstein, from the Donanto Foundation, and Fabian Farkas, Florian Fleischer, and Mehdi Damak, from Simon-Kucher & Partners, conducted two separate studies, focusing on fundraising and nonprofits: A 2020 Online Fundraising Quick Wins Study by the Donanto Foundation, and the Behavioral Nudging Study by Simon-Kucher & Partners. Both point to behavioral economics as an answer, with the results of the Simon-Kucher study being revealed to the public for the first time in this article.

With the study by Donanto having shown effective guidance to be the most powerful tool in achieving fundraising uplift, the team at Simon-Kucher looked more closely into different types of possible guidance. In the base case for the new Behavioral Nudging Study, potential donors were presented with three prefilled donation thresholds. Here, only 28 percent of donors chose to donate above the lowest suggested amount. This percentage was then improved in the study by applying additional nudges to deliver effective guidance:

  1. Highlight the value proposition
  2. Preselect a donation
  3. Make use of the herd effect

Read the full article about online donations by Fabian Farkas, Frank Bilstein, Florian Fleischer, and Mehdi Damak at Stanford Social Innovation Review.