We’re just about to cross the $200,000 mark in our End-of-Year Fundraising Campaign. More than 21,000 donors have given to Mozilla in the past 16 days, 17,000 for the very first time. I wanted to take a closer look at what our donor base looks like so far. Now that donations are coming in, we’re starting to dig into the data, and I will be sharing more analysis and test results.
About the Donors
I am pleasantly surprised that fully 50% of donations to date have come from outside the United States. So far we’ve received at least one donation from 138 countries. Mozilla is truly a global brand and our supporters from all over the world are chipping in.
Donations by locale
Our largest source of donations by far is the snippet. Ninety-two percent of revenue to date is from the snippet. No doubt the snippet will continue to make up the bulk of our income this month, but we have a number of diverse channels primed that haven’t yet been fully engaged. For instance, our email fundraising appeals are scheduled to launch later in December.
Donations by source
I was particularly intrigued by the fact that more than $2,500 in donations came in via the tiny “DONATE” link on the bottom footer of our Web pages. That link was added in the last couple of weeks in preparation for this campaign. It just goes to show that it pays to make it dead simple for people to find a donate link, no matter where they happen to be looking on your site.
the tiny donate link that could
The Mysterious World of Donation Amount Selection
We’re also analyzing how people are interacting with our donation forms. We’ll be testing different forms, and even different arrangements of fields on the form itself. The goal with this testing is to dial in our donation funnel and optimize conversion. (“Conversion” is the number of people who complete a donation divided by the number of people who visit the donation form).
One interesting part of tracking donation form performance is which specific amount an individual donor selects and why. Most people so far are selecting either $10 or $3. Or rather, they’re doing nothing and accepting the pre-selected, default amount as-is. I should point out that we purposefully set different default amounts on different pages. The default amount we set on a specific page is designed for the audience that will be visiting that page (at least, our best guess). For instance, people who donate by clicking on a link on our homepage have, in most cases, actively sought out Mozilla’s site with the intention of donating. Most of the time, those donors will give more than average. As a result, the default amount on our forms linked to the homepage is purposefully set higher – usually $20. On the other hand, the form on the snippet is for an audience less familiar with Mozilla, and therefore more likely to come in for their first donation at a lower level. The default on those pages is $10 in most cases.
Overall our average donation right now is around $9.67. The volume of smaller donations through the snippet is pulling the average down. That’s just fine by us – we are having good success asking for smaller amounts from a large pool of donors.
Below is a chart showing the most popular amounts selected by donors as they complete our standard donation forms. Keep in mind that four of the top five most popular amounts are listed on the form. Those are three, 10, 20 and 50, with 10 and 20 most often set as the default selection. However, the “$5” amount is not a default option on any of our forms, but a significant number of people are going out of their way to type a “5” into the “other” box. It could be interesting to test whether adding “$5” as a default amount will lift our overall average.
Donation by amount selection