How a direct ask via voicemail impacts donor giving behaviors

Buckner International

Buckner International is a global ministry dedicated to the transformation and restoration of the lives we serve. We are a Christ-centered organization that delivers redemptive ministry to the most vulnerable from the beginning to the ending of life.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 11/28/2017 - 12/05/2017

For Giving Tuesday, Buckner International wanted to test out a new channel of communication to see if we could boost donor giving. We utilized a service named SlyBroadcast that allows us to make straight to voicemail phone calls. It is a way of making a phone call to thousands of participants that would immediately show up as a missed phone call on their phone. While it is a recorded message, it would appear to be a genuine voicemail given the nature of the technology.

We had previously used SlyBroadcast for cultivation and stewardship messages to donors. This time around, we wanted to make a direct ask and request that donors go online or call back to make their Giving Tuesday gift.

We focused our audience on those that had both a phone number and email address on file. We then split this audience in half by their highest previous contribution levels to create equal segments so that we could create a treatment and control group that would not be skewed by past giving.

Research Question

Will a direct ask in a voicemail increase the the donor’s likelihood to give?

Results

This experiment has a required sample size of 3,923 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 4,528, and the level of confidence is not above 95% the experiment results are not valid.

Key Learnings

While not statistically significant, we did see a 28% decrease in the likelihood of someone that could have received the phone call to make a gift (the call had a ~60% deliverability rate so not everyone in the treatment group would have actually received the call). Given the low level of confidence, we would not go so far as to say that the phone call necessarily hurt the chances of a gift but it definitely did not increase the likelihood. Based upon these results, we will be reserving SlyBroadcast calls for cultivation and stewardship only.