Use Behavioral Science to Nudge Donors, Spur More Gifts

A common problem online is people not completing the checkout process — whether that’s buying a product or finishing a donation form. To help donors, or shoppers, complete the transaction, organizations try to remove things that make people pause the process, often called friction, according to Yana Gutierrez, head of platforms at payment processor Stripe.

“There are a couple of things that really bubble up to the surface in terms of common friction models,” said Gutierrez, who spoke at this month’s Donor Experience Summit, a fundraising conference. “How many steps does your checkout process take? It should be under five. Are you auto-filling things like address details? Are you offering them all the wallets they could possibly have for your checkouts?”

Removing friction may feel like common sense, but it’s also behavioral science at work, several of the conference’s speakers explained. Behavioral science can’t make people do things, noted behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert, who gave the closing keynote. But behavioral science can help nonprofits nudge donors to do the things donors already want to do — the things they came to the charity’s website to consider doing in the first place.

“We cannot change behavior directly,” Wallaert said. “What we can change is pressures.” There are two kinds of pressures that can be exerted on people: promoting pressures, which encourage folks to do things, and inhibiting pressures, which are obstacles to doing things.

“It is the job of everyone in this room to increase promoting pressure and reduce inhibiting pressures,” when it comes to donations, Wallaert said.

Gutierrez said that 70 percent of online shoppers abandon their carts. However, that share jumps to 85 percent when shoppers get to the payment screen and don’t see their preferred payment method. So offering a wide array of payment options for a donation is an easy way to reduce friction — inhibiting pressures — she said.

How to Apply Promoting Pressure

Many organizations focus on reducing inhibiting pressures, said Wallaert, because they tend to offer the “most bang for your buck” as they are more homogeneous. That is, the problems that cause people not to act look similar.

What motivates people to act, however, is often more varied and somewhat specific to them, so requires a heavier lift, Wallaert said.

Charities looking to apply promoting pressures should lean into what their donors like about themselves, advised Clare Purvis, a behavioral scientist who founded WELL, a company focused on women’s health.

“The most powerful intervention mechanism that we often forget about is identity when it comes to behavior change,” Purvis said. She recommends thinking about simple messages that “trigger identify frames” for donors.

“If you wanted to trigger an identity frame, you might say, ‘Thank you for being the kind of person who supports XYZ cause.’ Or ‘Thank you for being the kind of person that shows up when it matters,’” Purvis said. “Thinking about ways that you can activate identity — the kind of person I am, or even in some cases, the kind of person that I am opposed to: I’m not this person.”

Michael Hallsworth, chief behavioral scientist at the consulting firm Behavioural Insights Team, explained that highlighting how self-image differs from behavior can help induce the wanted behavior. He pointed to an experiment where a company selling tickets asked buyers if they wanted to donate to a charity before completing their purchase.  Asking with a yes/no option didn’t get great results. A simple language change encouraged more people to donate.

“If the choice was, ‘I’ve already donated’ or ‘I don’t want to donate,’ that led many more people to choose the option of donating,” Hallsworth said. “People wanted to avoid directly saying that they didn’t want to donate because it conflicted with their self-image.”

This technique can be helpful for charities whose donors may have self images associated with helping and generosity. But Hallsworth cautioned that when an ask brings up conflicts between the person’s self-image and the actions they are taking — or not taking — it doesn’t always produce a shift toward the desired action.

“The alternative is: You just change your attitude,” Hallsworth explained. “You can say, well actually I didn’t really believe that. As my behavior suggests, I don’t really care about that cause.”

A sense of urgency is something behavioral scientists have found can spur action, too, but donors need the urgency to be authentic, or they will be “reactive” and not make a donation, Purvis said. The reason: The potential donor feels you’re trying to trick them. She gave the example of websites that perpetually have a countdown clock purporting to be a deadline to act — even though it clearly isn’t.

“They’re powerful when they’re real,” Purvis said. “Helping people remember that can absolutely spur behavior, but it can totally backfire if it’s not true.”

It Pays to Experiment

While there are some basic principles of behavioral science, a lot of it requires experimentation to see what works as the pressure points for your group of donors, Wallaert said. He’s not a fan of segmenting donors on standard demographic categories, because it doesn’t say enough about their behavior — which is what you’re trying to impact.

“There are only five groups that matter: always, never, sometimes, started, stopped,” Wallaert said. “When you try to understand why are people doing it, it’s not segmentation around demographics, it’s not segmenting around what you think should drive people’s behavior, it’s around what they’re actually doing. Who always donates? Who never donates? Who sometimes donates? Who used to donate, but doesn’t anymore? Who just started donating?”

Jessica Bernat is the director of digital and sustainer marketing for the Canadian Red Cross. For a while she was afraid to experiment with the organization’s donation page, leaving the highlighted $75 suggested donation amount alone. But she wanted to see if the organization could move the needle on donations, so she decided to try different options, with good results.

“When we switched platforms, we started using AI, and really playing around with our donation amounts, specifically for one-time giving,” Bernat said. “We’ve seen a 5 percent increase in our average gift. Not doing anything else, and over the course of a year, it’s an over $2 million increase. So just little things like that have a big impact.”

To increase monthly giving, fundraisers experimented with what choices to place first and different prompts to donors. They tried three options, Bernat said: (1) putting the monthly donation option first, and requiring donors to unselect the monthly option to make a one-time gift; (2) starting with the option of a one-time gift, but putting a little heart over the option of monthly giving, and if donors selected a one-time gift, asking them on the next screen if they’d like to give a monthly gift instead; and (3) starting with a one-time gift and then asking them on the next two screens to switch to monthly giving.

“People did not like that third option,” she said. “So we ended up going with option two. In one year, we get 500 or 600 new monthly gifts converted just by having that.”