Thanks, Aaron. Just to add to Steve’s response below:
1) We think that part of the reason for the large increase in people pledging ~1% of their income this academic year is due to (a) better training and messaging (largely because we now have a full time staff member doing this), and (b) our improved donation platform. (b) has allowed us to set different defaults for different chapters, and for donors to set their start date further in the future, so it coincides with graduation. Before that, our donation defaults were targeted at MBAs, so undergrads in particular would log on, see a massive default relative to their expected salary, and pledge something significantly lower. Juniors and sophomores would also be unable to pledge far enough in the future to start giving at graduation and so would often put in a ‘symbolic’ $10 pledge, which partly explains why the average donation (as percentage of average graduation income) was pretty low before this year.
2) Our donation data indicates that the power of defaults is pretty strong among our members (a large mass of people give the default amount on the sign up page). We plan on experimenting with changing these default options (e.g. having 2% and/or 5% as well as 1%) and testing whether this makes a difference. At first we will just do this on the online platform, but we’ll also consider randomly selecting some chapters to have messaging about higher percentages in future years, and again testing if this makes a difference.
Thanks, Aaron. Just to add to Steve’s response below:
1) We think that part of the reason for the large increase in people pledging ~1% of their income this academic year is due to (a) better training and messaging (largely because we now have a full time staff member doing this), and (b) our improved donation platform. (b) has allowed us to set different defaults for different chapters, and for donors to set their start date further in the future, so it coincides with graduation. Before that, our donation defaults were targeted at MBAs, so undergrads in particular would log on, see a massive default relative to their expected salary, and pledge something significantly lower. Juniors and sophomores would also be unable to pledge far enough in the future to start giving at graduation and so would often put in a ‘symbolic’ $10 pledge, which partly explains why the average donation (as percentage of average graduation income) was pretty low before this year.
2) Our donation data indicates that the power of defaults is pretty strong among our members (a large mass of people give the default amount on the sign up page). We plan on experimenting with changing these default options (e.g. having 2% and/or 5% as well as 1%) and testing whether this makes a difference. At first we will just do this on the online platform, but we’ll also consider randomly selecting some chapters to have messaging about higher percentages in future years, and again testing if this makes a difference.