Amnesty Spain e-mail campaign yields 20:1 ROI
Howard Lake | 14 April 2004 | News
Can people who sign Web petitions or campaigns be converted into donors, and monthly donors at that? An Amnesty Spain campaign in 2003 suggests they can.
The ePhilanthropy Foundation has reported an impressive example of how a non-profit has acquired a large base of online donors in a very short campaign.
The campaign focused on two Nigerian women who were facing execution. Amnesty Spain launched a Web-based petition in response to the cases and in a few weeks over 240,000 e-mail addresses had been added to the petition. Amnesty then e-mailed 220,000 of these people encouraging them to become donors, and secured an impressive result of 1,022 monthly committed givers giving ‚€13 a month. A further 688 people gave a one-off gift of ‚€50.
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The appeal included a split test, with half the list receiving a plain text e-mail and the other half an HTML version. HTML received a 50% higher response rate than plain text.
Two months later Amnesty Spain repeated the petition campaign, securing another 200,000 e-mail sign-ups. Of these 180,000 were mailed with an HTML-only appeal and the results were even better than the first appeal: 1,478 people signed up to give ‚€14 a month, and 977 people gave one-off donations averaging ‚€44.
While few organisations will be able to achieve a comparable return on investment of 20:1, the ePhilanthropy Foundation concludes that “when there is a high profile event connected to an organisation’s core mission, online acquisition techniques like contests, quizzes, and petitions can gather incredibly larger [sic] warm lists – which then can be subsequently converted to online donors.”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.