CCAH Blog: Industry Voices

Testing: Proving women are easy and cheap!

  

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By Kim Cubine, Managing Principal

There are more women donors than there are male donors. For years, numerous nonprofit trend watchers and independent tracking groups have confirmed this fact.

What we really don’t know is why women contribute more frequently.

• Do women give more because they are more compassionate than men?
• Do women contribute more because they like to spend money?
• Do women actually have more free time than men?
• Do women give at the same level as men?

Well, I couldn’t really answer the first three questions outside of my own personal experience. But we could definitely test the giving level between men and women with organizations to determine if there was indeed a difference.

We decided to implement a "direct mail battle of the sexes."  Using a prospect control package we set up a series of ask string tests and split the file between men and women. The test panels were established as follows:

• Women received three ask string variations:  control ask, low dollar ask, and high dollar ask.
• Men received three ask string variations: control ask, low dollar ask, and high dollar ask.

Wow - women give at a higher rate but in every case they gave at a lower gift level than the men.

As a matter of fact, for the male test segments there was no statistical difference in the control and the high dollar asking string.

For women, the opposite was true. The low dollar test segment had a 20% increase in response rate over the control panel. And the lower average gift did not have a negative impact because the investment per donor was 13% lower due to the increased percent response.

Overall, it costs this organization less to recruit women than it does to recruit men.

This test was repeated in the house files and for some organizations we have now established different gender based asking strings depending on the test results.  

So by all means, if you haven’t pitted (I mean, “tested”) women against men on your donor file, do it today! And let us know what your results are!