Most experienced annual giving professionals agree that there is always room for improvement. Even highly effective strategies for raising annual funds for educational institutions can become more successful. They can be more cost-effective, garner a larger average gift, or have a higher response rate.

How to make fundraising strategies more successful is where A/B testing comes in. This tool has become increasingly popular in recent years. The vast majority of annual giving staff indicated they plan to do more testing in the next six months than previously, according to an AGN poll. 

That’s because A/B testing is a simple and low-risk way to see how potential changes to an approach will perform before rolling them out to the entire audience or implementing them permanently. In other words, it’s a way of dipping a toe in the water, before deciding to wade or to jump in.

The most important thing to remember when testing is to alter only one variable at a time. That will ensure that any difference in performance can be traced back to the one change that was made. For example, when sending two versions of a Giving Tuesday email to learn which one gets a higher response rate, either the subject line or the sender name should be different between the control and test versions. If both are different, it will be impossible to determine why one version had a higher click-through rate than the other.

In addition to testing more than one variable at once, another temptation when testing is to add elements to the control version to see if they make a positive difference. Examples include adding a teaser to an outer envelope, adding the sender’s picture to an email, or adding another student financial aid profile to a letter or impact report.

Sometimes, however, more can be learned when elements are removed from a control, rather than added. That is the concept of backward testing. Take an existing package as a control and ask: What is essential to make the case? Could a two-page letter be consolidated into one page? Could a renewal letter be condensed into a postcard? Could the reply device be a tear-off instead of a separate card?

Saving money is the primary reason to test backward. Perhaps an invoice-style letter will bring in more money than an expertly designed and beautifully printed (and expensive!) direct mail package. If so, the program’s cost to raise a dollar will decrease accordingly. The other reason to test backward is to determine if there is any positive significance to taking a simpler, more streamlined approach.

As with all A/B testing, testing backward should be done incrementally and more than one time – to allow the findings to compound and to validate making major changes to strategies that have proven effective in the past. 

Because there is no such thing as “good enough” in annual giving, A/B testing can help determine what to change to improve.