Sure, Pine. I am happy offer some thoughts:
The two main challenges for the online fundraising team are the decrease in page views in the countries where we raise the most funds and the shift from desktop to mobile, where the donation rate and the donation size are much smaller. In response to this, we estimate that we will need a campaign that performs approximately 20 percent better than last year – just to keep revenue constant – not to grow.
Leila is right that page views are not a perfect indicator. Page views do not donate, people do. We know page views are going down but we do not know who is leaving us. Still, we *are* seeing an impact on donations from a decrease in page views. This is the second big fundraising season where we have been up against a page view decline. Last year, we responded with a dramatic shift in tactics. This year, we are focusing on finding smaller refinements that will get us there. The good news is that we are getting close! And, I think the online fundraising team is working in earnest to engage with community members and other staff who have ideas around the message. Some ideas have been incorporated into the campaign, others not. The process has been helpful to us and I hopefully not too disappointing for you. For what it is worth, the team does not use the vast majority of my ideas – and I respect them for that. :)
There are some concerns around the urgency of the message that we are still trying to work through. To be honest, we haven’t seen this surface in past research or when we talk to our donors. Still, we recognize that we may not have been asking the right questions or framing it right. We care a lot that that we are giving an accurate impression about our need for donations. So, we have drilled down on this more in our research to better understand what our readers think on this topic. We should have more to share on that in a week or two.
The concerns raised about the size of the budget and the rate of growth of the organization need to involve more people than just fundraising. We will give our perspectives on what is happening with the “topline” as a part of a larger planning conversation.
Best,
Lisa Gruwell
On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 11:12 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Fundraising folks, can we get an update in response to the concerns raised in this thread?
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