Hi,
Below is my usual analysis of the donation campaign.
Summary:
Amount 112 129€ +42%
Number of donations 2799 +40%
Recurring donors 297 +29%
Boots per month in 2020 30250 +20%
Work time 35 h -27%
This does include a huge donation in bitcoins worth 34.7k€.
This does not include a huge donation of 50k€ from a company that
contacted us on tails-fundraising@???. They didn't want to be named
on our sponsors page but we usually don't include sponsors in the
analysis of the campaign.
The campaign was 10% shorter (88 days instead of 96 usually) and started
right after Tor launched their campaign, which I always avoided in the
past. We would have had even better results with a slightly longer and
slightly earlier campaign.
Cryptos
-------
Cryptocurrencies have seen a huge increase this year going from:
- 39% of the money to 69%
- 29% of donations to 35%
Bitcoin grew more in amount (+368%) and not only because of the huge
donation. Monero grew more in donations (+254%).
Other cryptos are still peanuts with less than 1% of the money.
Incentives
----------
This year, we did 3 significant changes to how we advertised the
donation campaign:
### Design work on /donate and the banner
For record, we:
- Improved the structure and text on /donate.
- Worked with Andrés to create images for /donate and the banner.
- Improved the slogan on the banner based on a survey from previous
donors and tested the banner with potential donors.
### Twitter
I did an extensive Twitter campaign, with help from Estrella Soria and
scheduled 34 tweets in 4 languages across 68 days.
9% of the referrers on /donate came from Twitter. That's a lot!
In comparison, only 1.2% of finalized PayPal donations came directly
from a link on Twitter, that is, without additional clicks in-between.
This number is computer on very few such donations so pretty unreliable.
What I'm not sure here is whether Twitter users drop out much more
(likely if they didn't know Tails before) or whether Twitter donors
browsed other parts of the website before donating (likely as well).
Last year I didn't have the logs of the website so I can't really
compare how much more this was.
### Blog posts
I only wrote 2 blog posts:
- /news/achievements_in_2020, on December 23
- /news/plans_for_2021, on January 8
In the past, we always launched the campaign with an extra post. This
post was usually the most painful to write because we have to find yet
another way of asking for money.
To evaluate the impact of this opening post, I compared the 1st week of
the campaign with the first 4 weeks of the campaign, in 2019 and 2020.
In 2019, 46% of the donations in the first 4 weeks were done in the 1st
week, versus 50% in 2020. In 2019, the first 4 weeks also included our
usual blog post on achievements.
So our campaign launched more successfully in 2020 without opening post.
There is also no clear sign of extra activity after the 2 later blog
posts from 2020.
This confirms data from previous years: carefully crafting blog posts
has very little impact on the results of the campaign.
Communication with donors
-------------------------
This year, I did 2 improvements to how we keep in touch with donors:
- I added a checkbox on /donate for people to opt in to a newsletter,
2-3 times a year. 26% of PayPal donors opted in to receive our
newsletter.
- I started using the invitation feature of LimeSurvey to send the call
to the donation campaign and the thank you email. It's totally hackish
but allows sending prettier emails and provides an opt out link to
recipients. Before people had to send us an email to opt out.
Many more people unsubscribed with this new opt out mechanism. I don't
think that's because of the format or content of the email and rather
because of the change in the subscription mechanism.
I have good hopes that both these improvements will help us build a
stronger relationships with donors in the long run.
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
