Fundraising is an important part of many progressive organizations, and Organizing for America is no exception—it takes a lot of money to keep staff employed in all 50 states and to fund our advocacy efforts to advance the President’s agenda and elect Democrats across the country.  Rather than take money from PACs and lobbyists, OFA—a project of the Democratic National Committee—depends on grassroots supporters to keep the operation running.  The question that often comes up is: When is the right time to ask supporters for money?

Until recently, it was standard practice to include a “Donate” button at the bottom of all advocacy emails that Organizing for America sent to people on the email list.  The thinking was that it gave supporters an easy way to support us financially if they were feeling particularly inspired by the work we’d been doing.  However, we found that many of the subscribers on our email list were expressing dissatisfaction that we seemed to be asking for money too often.  So we decided to test what effect the “Donate” button actually had on supporter response.

In early February of this year, OFA Director Mitch Stewart sent an email to the Organizing for America list asking everyone to use OFA’s online tools to write letters to their local newspapers on the urgent need to pass comprehensive health reform.  For this email, we isolated two randomly selected groups of email subscribers, sent a version of the email with a “Donate” button to one, and sent a version of the email without the “Donate” button to the other.

The response reflected what we’d been hearing from our subscribers: Not only did including the “Donate” button increase the number of email recipients who unsubscribed (by 18.7%*), but it decreased the number who wrote letters (by 9.1%*) and did not increase the number of donations made (the number of recipients who donated from the email with the “Donate” button was equal to the number who donated on their own after taking action from the email with no button).  In short, having the button hurt our advocacy work and did nothing to help our fundraising.

It was clear from this test that sending advocacy emails is not when we should be asking for money.

* Statistically significant with 95% confidence