Interview: Interactive Strategies Focuses on Testing to Increase Online Revenue for The Wilderness Society
This month we’re continuing a series of interviews with some of EveryAction’s consulting partners across the country. In this interview, EveryAction’s Michael Stein speaks with Hannah Leigh, Associate Director of Client Services, Digital Marketing at Interactive Strategies. Interactive Strategies is a 360-degree agency headquartered in Washington DC. Their services include web design, development, strategy, marketing, content, and analytics in addition to their fundraising and email work, which has doubled YOY since 2018. Interactive Strategies is a strategic digital partner for an incredible number of nonprofits, associations and B2B2C companies, including several on EveryAction such as The Wilderness Society, American Association of University Women and Environmental Working Group.
We’re excited to talk with you about your work with The Wilderness Society, which is on the EveryAction platform. We know you worked with them during the year-end fundraising season; what types of testing were you able to perform during year-end 2019 and how did it impact their fundraising revenue?
Hannah Leigh: The year-end fundraising season is a critical time for us to perform important tests for our larger nonprofit clients because we’re often able to obtain statistically significant testing results due to the large volume of emails we send and the large volume of donations we receive online. This was the first year-end season that The Wilderness Society was using EveryAction, so we were particularly excited to test the use of Highest Previous Contribution (HPC) data to determine ask amounts, and specifically whether this would outperform the use of a $100 default gift amount. In terms of a strategy to increase revenue from existing donors, using HPC data to determine ask amounts was our top priority this year, as this functionality wasn’t available with their previous digital fundraising platform. We were thrilled that our testing was successful! The use of HPC data did increase revenue for our active donor audience.
What other functionality on the EveryAction platform has caught your eye?
Hannah: We’re excited about the FastAction form auto-fill tools for donation pages and forms. We love that it fills out the donor’s name, address and email, which saves tons of time for donors, especially for people using smaller screens. We think this provides a great user experience for donors and will increase the completion rate of donation pages and increase revenue.
We’re impressed by your focus on testing for The Wilderness Society. What other testing is on your horizon for their digital fundraising program in 2020?
Hannah: Pretty much anything that will increase revenue! The testing tools on EveryAction seem really flexible, so we’re planning to perform several fundamental tests in 2020. We usually set a testing plan by brainstorming all the ideas we have that could potentially impact revenue, then prioritizing those tests by scale of impact. For example, we want to test if we should set the default to monthly giving instead of one-time giving on all of their donation pages. That will typically decrease short term revenue, but increase revenue in the long-term and increase the lifetime value of donors who convert. We also want to test the ideal number of ask amount buttons on the donation pages. We’re going to test 5 versus 6 ask amount buttons, and then 6 versus 7 buttons. These may seem like trivial changes, but they have an impact on revenue over time, especially for larger programs. Finally, we’re going to continue to test the addition of higher value ask amounts ($1,000+) on all our donation pages. This probably won’t impact our smaller value donors, but we’re hoping to better understand how it moves our mid-level donors to increase their giving over time.
About the Expert
Hannah Leigh serves as the Associate Director of Client Services, Digital Marketing at Interactive Strategies. She has six years of digital marketing experience and has previously worked in digital marketing and account management for The Advisory Board Company, LivingSocial and PublicRelay. Hannah’s passion for marketing lies in developing creative, actionable digital campaigns that target active and engaged audiences.
