Shoppers, let’s start the clock because it’s time to learn how you can win your year-end fundraising race.  You may already be thinking, “What does year-end fundraising have to do with the 90s game show Supermarket Sweep?” Let’s look at three taglines from the show, and you can decide if you’ve ever felt the same way about your year-end fundraising. So the first tagline is “Race against time to grab the priciest items you can find.” Have you ever felt like that at year-end? What about this tagline? “A frantic free-for-all all to find the most expensive items (or the most valuable donor ..read more

Life is full of disappointments big and small. And, unfortunately, A/B testing is no different. Why? Because not every A/B test you run will produce a valid result. We’ve run thousands of A/B tests over the past 10+ years. And a good portion of them never reached statistical significance — which is what we mean by a valid result. What exactly is statistical significance? First of all, it’s not just something we made up for fundraising. From a statistical perspective, significance (or level of confidence) measures your likelihood of a “false positive.” What is a false positive? An a/b test is ..read more

Why do people give?  This has been the question at the heart of our work since NextAfter was founded.  Decoding what motivates people to give—and sharing what we learn with as many nonprofits as possible—is the driving force behind the extensive research we’ve conducted over more than a decade of helping nonprofits optimize their fundraising. In this post, you’ll learn everything our experience has taught us about why people give and ways you can use those lessons in your own work. And it starts with answering fundraising’s most fundamental question … Why do people decide to give to ..read more

Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.  And for anyone who’s been using Google Optimize to optimize and a/b test their digital fundraising, that rings especially true. Because in case you haven’t heard …  Google will be sunsetting Google Optimize on September 30! While this news is sure to cause stress for nonprofits that rely on the popular (and free) platform for their A/B testing needs, it doesn’t mean you should stop A/B testing altogether. There are other A/B testing platforms that nonprofits can use to continue decoding what works in digital fundraising.  ..read more

Hard truth: nonprofits are losing donors.  In fact, according to data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, donor acquisition, dollars, and donor retention rates fell YoY in 2022. But to understand why donor counts are falling, we first have to understand why they went up so rapidly in the last few years.   We’ve dubbed this the COVID Bump. What is the COVID Bump? The “COVID bump” refers to the surge in donations that many nonprofit organizations experienced in response to COVID during April 2020 and December 2021.  The surge was largely driven by a combination of ..read more

Hard truth: nonprofits are losing donors.  In fact, according to data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, donor acquisition, dollars, and donor retention rates fell YoY in 2022. But to understand why donor counts are falling, we first have to understand why they went up so rapidly in the last few years.   We’ve dubbed this the COVID Bump. What is the COVID Bump? The “COVID bump” refers to the surge in donations that many nonprofit organizations experienced in response to COVID during April 2020 and December 2021.  The surge was largely driven by a combination of ..read more

By now you’ve heard the news: Google Analytics 4 is set to replace Universal Analytics. Soon. In fact, if you’ve recently logged into your Universal Analytics account (often called GA3), you’ve no doubt seen Google’s none-too-subtle reminder… So in case you’ve been crossing your fingers and toes and hoping against hope that maybe Google would change its mind about forcing nonprofits to migrate over to GA4 . . . Now is the time to abandon that hope and begin the migration process. Luckily, Google provides a GA4 setup assistant to help you get started. But we definitely recommend enlisting the ..read more

By now you’ve heard the news: Google Analytics 4 is set to replace Universal Analytics. Soon. In fact, if you’ve recently logged into your Universal Analytics account (often called GA3), you’ve no doubt seen Google’s none-too-subtle reminder… So in case you’ve been crossing your fingers and toes and hoping against hope that maybe Google would change its mind about forcing users to migrate over to GA4 . . . Now is the time to abandon that hope and begin the migration process. Luckily, Google provides a GA4 setup assistant to help you get started. But we definitely recommend enlisting the help ..read more

Pop the confetti and cue the music because we’ve just hit a major milestone: this week we logged our 5,000th digital fundraising experiment in our experiment library.  That’s a whole lot of testing, tweaking, and analysis. And we’ve experienced our fair share of “aha” moments, forehead slaps, and unexpected learnings along the way.  To commemorate the occasion, we’re sharing a few of the most enduring and impactful digital fundraising lessons these 5,000 tests have uncovered—time-tested lessons that have the power to measurably improve your program today and into the future. But firs ..read more

Google Optimize is going away September 30, 2023. For nonprofit organizations focused on growing their digital fundraising, this news comes as a shock because as we emphasize, the primary way for you to decode what works to inspire more donors to give online is through testing and optimization.  So, we gathered some insights from a couple of NextAfter staff about what this means for you. Here’s what NextAfter’s Vice President of Client Services, Rebekah Josefy had to say: “The sunsetting of Google Optimize was disappointing and unexpected news, considering the number of nonprofits who hea ..read more