As you gear up for your crucial end-of-year appeals, implementing the right tests could be the key to boosting those all-important donations.
From how to get started with testing to understanding the data behind specific testing techniques, here are the highlights from our latest webinar with Jess Hodge, Forward Action’s Digital Strategy Manager. Learn how to make your winter appeals work harder for you, and how to sustain a testing strategy into the new year.
Why Testing Matters: Tinsel for Your Campaign 🎄
Testing gives your campaign a boost, helping your pages work smarter to get more results with the same effort. It makes things smoother and easier for users, which means better first impressions and stronger connections with supporters.
Plus, testing takes the guesswork out of decision-making, so you can be confident you’re focusing on what really resonates with your audience.
Testing has helped our partners – including Refuge, Comic Relief, and Dignity in Dying – achieve great results, laying the groundwork for campaigns that don’t just work this winter, but continue to improve year on year.
How to Get Started
To kick off effective testing, it’s essential to formalise your approach and make testing part of your organisational culture.
Start by identifying a clear problem area, like low click-throughs on emails or drop-offs on your donation page, and decide what specific aspect to test—whether it’s messaging, layout, or target audience.
Then, prioritise your testing ideas based on impact and effort, focusing first on changes that are likely to have the biggest return on your time and resources.
When setting up your tests, keep things consistent across different variations. For instance, use the same budget and timeframe in social media ad tests, or send email variants simultaneously to control for external factors.
And remember, a fair and reliable test changes only one variable at a time, so you can confidently attribute any performance difference to that single change. Reliable results often require running a test more than once or testing across multiple scenarios if you want insights that you can generalise across different settings.
The 12 Tests of Christmas 🎅
Here are the ideas Jess shared, each designed to maximise results for your winter appeal:
- Creative Framing: Test visuals and messaging to see what inspires action the most – do you always need a case study? An effective framing can make a big difference and sometimes short and sweet copy is all you need.
- Audiences: Try testing direct-to-donate ads with a broad audience as well as warm audiences to see if you get a higher ROAS (return on ad spend).
- Ask Variety in Emails: People respond to different kinds of asks, so make sure to test a mix: it’s not only direct fundraising asks that motivate supporters to donate, but more intriguing engagement asks followed by a donate ask, too.
- Emotions to Drive Action: Which tone resonates more—optimism or outrage? Use email engagement metrics to try different framings and compare results.
- Segmentation by Donor Value: Personalised messaging for different kinds of donors can improve conversion rates and average donation amounts. For example, giving higher donation prompts to people that have donated higher amounts before.
- Reactive Content: Sending timely, relevant content within 24 hours of an event led to some of the highest donation rates for our partners last year – test this with emails or direct-to-donate ads.
- Tangible vs Broader Donate Prompts: Specific donation prompts often lead to higher average gifts. If you have things you can package up into parcels people can ‘buy’, this can be really motivating.
- Low-fi vs Designed Emails: Sometimes, simpler emails outperform highly designed ones, but adding creative elements can have a great impact and help tell a story, making it worth testing both approaches.
- The Timing of Recruiting New Supporters: Although we often see the cost of recruiting a supporter increase ahead of Christmas, if your issue area can be linked to the time of year and you can put a festive spin on a donate ask, then it can be an effective time to build your list as well.
- Social Proof: Highlighting the number of others donating can boost donation rates by as much as 66%. Running tests like these in October and November means you can run the best performing variant in December.
- Asking Supporters to Double Donations: Prompts to double donations can encourage higher giving from existing supporters – definitely worth testing!
- WhatsApp for Fundraising: Experimenting with WhatsApp as a donation channel offers an exciting new way to engage. We’re trialling this now and early results look positive!
Rules for Reliable Results
Last but not least, remember that to keep your tests fair and reliable, you need to make sure you gather enough data, especially if you’re dealing with lower traffic levels. Running key tests multiple times before making final decisions can also help avoid missteps. Not every test will yield dramatic results, but each insight contributes to a stronger campaign.
This season, embrace the spirit of testing, and you’ll be set to deliver some of your best winter appeal results yet!
If you want last minute help with your Christmas campaign or to get ahead with testing in the new year (when we often see CPAs are lower!) get in touch with us at hello@forwardaction.uk
You can also watch the full webinar recording here.
Q&A
Here are the questions and answers from the Q&A at the end of the webinar.
If I could only do one of these tests, what should it be?
It depends on the organisation, but some of the most exciting test results come from testing reactive content – taking opportunities to try different asks based on current events. This means you need to be able to get things out quickly, so it is dependent on having streamlined processes and a working culture that allows for this.
Also, testing different donate prompts in emails is a great test to try and can be a bit simpler to roll out.
How much budget should you allocate to testing?
Testing doesn’t need to cost a lot, there are some very low-cost or free testing platforms to try. For testing with media spend, we’d suggest allocating 5-10% of your budget for testing, so you can spend the majority of your budget on the winning variant.
Should we apply the learnings from the tests you shared today to our own campaigns, or could the results be different from org to org?
Do your own testing! Results can vary hugely between organisations and audiences. We always get different results on our tests depending on the partner. Use the learnings from this webinar as inspiration, but know that you might get quite different findings.
Does outrage vs hope depend on the time of year eg. Christmas is a more hopeful time?
Overall, we’ve found that we do generally see an outrage framing outperforming a hopeful one, as long as there is a meaningful action that supporters can take in response to this, including at Christmas. The new year might be an interesting time to try a more hopeful framing, as people’s mindsets can shift as they’re looking at a fresh year ahead. But you should test this!
How would you recommend acknowledging a low vs mid vs high level donor?
Our testing has shown us that whenever you can reference a supporter’s previous generosity, and align the prompts they see with this, you’ll see better conversion rates and average gifts. On some platforms, the tech can work wonderfully to make this very personalised to the supporter, but you may need to do it manually if you don’t have access to this. Even so, it’s still worth referencing it, even if it’s just to acknowledge that they have previously donated – ideally we suggest referencing this through the whole journey, but at least do so on the donate asks.
What % of email subscribers would you recommend for a test?
You should send to 5-10k supporters as a general rule per test to get the data you want – but it’s also based on your performance benchmarks and how engaged your list is.
What’s the best way to record all of your results so you can actually understand and action the learnings?
Having a shared testing spreadsheet that is updated regularly is simple but effective. Include the test hypothesis, set up, what the result was and what the suggested action is e.g. ‘roll out as best practice’/’repeat test’/’drop test’.
When you have trends or positive learnings from your tests, roll them out to the wider organisation.
—
We also had a few specific questions about using WhatsApp. We’re currently testing this as an engagement tool and we’ll share more with you all soon. Watch this space, and get in touch at hello@forwardaction.uk if you’d like to find out how we can help you get set up on WhatsApp!
