Anya Samek studies whether a personalised, heartfelt thank you call is will encourage donors to give again. Spoiler alert: it doesn't
'Donors gave US$380 million to nonprofits during 2018’s Giving Tuesday donation drive.
Many of the groups getting donations like those follow up by calling donors to thank them, leaving a voicemail if nobody picks up the phone.
I’m a behavioral economist, and I study the effectiveness of fundraising practices. I wanted to see if these calls made people more likely to support a charity again.
To find out, I teamed up with Chuck Longfield, who recently retired from a cloud software company that has many nonprofit clients.
For our study, we partnered with nearly 70 public television stations and one large national nonprofit. They sent us lists of half a million new donors from 2011 through 2016. The average size of a first donation was $150 for the public TV stations and $70 for the nonprofit.
We randomly assigned some of the donors to get thank-you calls – which can cost the charities about $1 each to outsource. The rest didn’t get calls.' ... Keep reading on The Conversation
'Donors gave US$380 million to nonprofits during 2018’s Giving Tuesday donation drive.
Many of the groups getting donations like those follow up by calling donors to thank them, leaving a voicemail if nobody picks up the phone.
I’m a behavioral economist, and I study the effectiveness of fundraising practices. I wanted to see if these calls made people more likely to support a charity again.
To find out, I teamed up with Chuck Longfield, who recently retired from a cloud software company that has many nonprofit clients.
For our study, we partnered with nearly 70 public television stations and one large national nonprofit. They sent us lists of half a million new donors from 2011 through 2016. The average size of a first donation was $150 for the public TV stations and $70 for the nonprofit.
We randomly assigned some of the donors to get thank-you calls – which can cost the charities about $1 each to outsource. The rest didn’t get calls.' ... Keep reading on The Conversation