Increasing Unicef's average one-off donation amount by more than 50%

From our user research, we uncovered a number of key insights that we believed could be used to drive the right donors towards a behavior switch.

Firstly, one of our earlier experiments indicated that Unicef’s donors gain more satisfaction when they know about the overarching cause that their donation is contributing to. When we started working on Unicef’s website, a lot of the messaging was focused around very specific goals that a donation would support. Things like the number of glasses of water a donation would buy. By focussing on the overarching cause rather than the particulars, we were confident we’d be able to influence user behavior in the desired direction.

Secondly, from the results of an earlier experiment, we knew that one-off donors were more likely to increase their donation than monthly donors. This suggested that we might have more success focussing our efforts on the one-off donor segment.

Finally, research from the field of behavioral economics showed that displaying a donation target on our donation page could increase donation amounts considerably. This would be particularly useful for Unicef if they found themselves in a situation where they needed to raise funds quickly.

Unfortunately, there was a catch:

Further research suggested that users were generally more motivated to donate when the progress percentage was higher –  so, for example, if a donation target showed as being 80% complete, people would be more likely to donate than if it showed as being 20% complete.

Our concern was that by displaying a lower progress percentage, we might actually reduce the number of donations Unicef received.

Pulling together to make a difference

Rallying people together around a single cause is a proven technique for generating results – the political world absolutely thrives off of it. Our strategy was to take this technique and apply it to Unicef’s website with the aim of increasing their total donations.

Based on all of the research above, we hypothesized that displaying a donation target alongside a target progress bar would produce an uplift in the average donation size and total donation amount.

Our primary concern, informed by the behavioral economics research cited above, was that a progress bar might disincentivise users from donating if the progress percentage was too low. One way around this would have been to display an artificially high progress percentage at all times, but Unicef were understandably eager not to mislead their donors by displaying a false progress report.

In the end we built a custom script to integrate the donation target display with Unicef’s google analytics account, allowing us to dynamically update the progress percentage and progress bar every time a new donation was received.

We chose to set the time period for the target as a week rather than a month, and hoped that by doing so, we would minimise any of the adverse effects that might arise as a result of displaying a lower progress percentage.

“Great to work with, and always looking to find ways of adding value to the partnership.”

James McDiarmid Head of Digital