Why you should be testing your forms: Let's Make a Deal

Let's say I offer you two envelopes, "A" and "B", and a choice.

• Each envelope contains some amount of money for your organization's mission.

• There's a good chance that one envelope contains a lot more than the other.

• I promise you that you'll receive the amount in one of these envelopes every day for the next year.

Before you make your choice, one more thing:

I will start by giving you envelope A, and I'll give you that amount every day for the first month.

Then you have a choice:

Would you like to switch to envelope B for the second month? After the second month it will always be up to you to choose which envelope you receive each day.

The risk:

The risk in the second month is significant. Envelope B might contain much less than envelope A. If you switch to envelope B for a month, you could be losing a lot.

The reward:

What you gain from switching for one month is information: you will know the amount in each envelope, and you can then make a fully informed decision, and choose the better envelope every day for the rest of the year.

Here's the thing:

Testing your contribution forms carries a risk: you might test a change that reduces your total contributions.

But it also carries a potential reward: you might test a change that shows you how to increase your contributions.

Even better, the choices you have are not as opaque and absolute as envelopes A and B.

• You can use what you already know to design changes that actually have a good chance of working.

• It's not all or nothing. You can test on a small subset of donations and still get a lot of valuable information.

All the best,
A.