It’s been just over a month since Mozilla launched our year-end fundraising campaign, and we only have four days before it comes to an end.
U.S. non-profits in general should see a gradual increase in daily revenue as the deadline (December 31st) gets closer. The reason? U.S. donors have a growing sense of urgency to donate before December 31st in order to receive the tax deduction for charitable gifts. To date, about 50% of donations to Mozilla are coming from the U.S. Like many non-profits, we are leveraging this sense of urgency among donors by emphasizing the deadline across channels in the last days of the campaign.
We want to see daily revenue trend lines going up and to the right. Let’s look at our channels.
Mozilla.org homepage. Average daily revenue through Mozilla.org is increasing as expected. There are details in my earlier blog post about homepage donors and optimizing revenue from that channel. They’re our most engaged donors and are most likely to be experiencing the campaign through multiple channels (email, snippet, social). Creating this “echo chamber” is very strategic. The repetition of our message increases the likelihood a potential donor will become an actual donor. We’re purposefully turning up the volume across all our channels the closer we get to December 31st.
Social networks. Though a relatively small share of our total, daily revenue through Twitter and Facebook is also trending higher in recent days. (Check out that outlier donation in early December.)
Email. By design, we timed our email appeals to send as close to December 31st as possible. We are sending a total of six emails between December 16th and December 31st:
- 12/16: Message #1 to Mozilla email list (820,000 recipients)
- 12/23: Message #2 to Mozilla email list (non-donors only)
- 12/26: Message #3 to Mozilla email list (non-donors)
- 12/30: Message #4 to Mozilla email list (non-donors)
- 12/30: Message to Firefox & You newsletter (3.7 million recipients; localized English, German, French, Portuguese)
- 12/31: Message #5 to Mozilla email list (non-donors)
You can see revenue spikes on days emails launch, as you’d expect. Generally the bulk of donations will come in within the first 24 hours of sending an email appeal, and a trickle of late donations will continue beyond the 24-hr mark.
Overall, Mozilla’s fundraising campaign is progressing as expected, with upward-rightward trends… that is with one big exception: The snippet. No other organization has the snippet, it is its own unique animal. It also is the source of 86% of the $750,000 raised to date.
I’ll write a future post about the peaks and valleys we see in this graph, mostly due to our snippet testing. We’ve gained a lot of new knowledge about the snippet during the campaign.
Excluding snippet revenue, trends are going in the right direction:
