GiveList Pilot

Testing a solution to improve the online donation experience

Challenge

Today’s donors face an overwhelming number of choices when researching and making donation decisions. Behavioral science research suggests that when people experience this “choice overload,” they often struggle to make a decision or abandon taking action altogether. Inspired by recent academic research around this issue, our client was interested in testing expert curation as a potential solution to these moments of overchoice in online giving. How might we leverage the due diligence and experience of expert philanthropists and organizations to help donors identify and give to high-performing nonprofits?

The GiveList pilot presented a unique opportunity to collaborate with 7 donor platforms, 15 expert philanthropists, and over 120 non-profits to encourage experimentation and innovation at a level rarely seen in the sector.

Process

Sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, our team managed a series of tests over a two year period of donor responses to “GiveLists,” expert-curated lists of vetted charities. We measured donor engagement, donation frequency, and donation amount to evaluate how curated lists influenced giving decisions. These tests were launched in partnership with platforms ranging from large national donor advised funds (DAFs) to online giving platforms (e.g. Charity Navigator) to workplace donation providers. Each test was tailored to each platform’s capacity and unique role in the donor ecosystem, ranging from integrated homepage features to simple email campaigns to embedded widgets in relevant news stories. 

The pilot involved a wide array of stakeholders, including expert curators like Michael Bloomberg, over 90 individual non-profits, and 8 leading giving platforms. My role was to generate concepts to test, lead the partner engagement, and provide implementation support throughout the pilot. Because many of these platforms were unfamiliar with this sort of behavioral science intervention and inexperienced in running rigorous research, we partnered with ideas42, a behavioral science research firm, to support the experiment design and measurement.

Outcome

The GiveList pilot is the first known quantitative, controlled test on donors’ response to expert curation across multiple giving contexts. It generated a number of insights into how and when expert curation can be used to potentially increase participation and donation amounts. I presented many of those insights at a convening hosted at the Gates Foundation for over 100 of our pilot partners. You can also read more about those insights in a paper and blog post published by our collaborators at ideas42. 

Beyond the behavioral research, the pilot generated interest in sector innovation from curators, platforms, and other key stakeholders. Our research provided valuable insights about the technical and logistical limitations of major donation platforms, including helping platforms assess and address their own system limitations around experimentation and data collection.

The GiveList concept is now being developed into a future product offering by a large non-profit data supplier.

Project team: Michael Diederich and Beth Wesche