The Challenge
Doctors Without Borders (DWB), is the name by which Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is known in the USA. DWB is one of the world’s leading humanitarian agencies. It provides specialist medical teams – doctors, nurses, surgeons, anaesthetists, health workers – to work in the most challenging situations imaginable. At any time DWB might have teams working with rural villagers in Congo to treat and prevent the spread of Ebola, in Yemen operating on women and children injured in the civil war, and in Syria providing essential healthcare to refugees living in cramped unhygienic conditions.
DWB’s work in remote places and their willingness to identify those responsible for suffering means they are not always an easy cause to sell to comfortable Western populations. Concerned any government money would compromise their independence, they are entirely dependent on the goodwill of private individuals and foundations. =mc consulting decisionscience team is proud to have worked on a number of strategies and campaigns for MSF in Switzerland, France, Mexico, Ireland, and of course the USA.
DWB approached =mc to help and design a series of online experiments exploring how decision science might help improve giving from prospects and supporters.
What We Did
=mc worked with the brilliant Director of Development, Thomas Kurmann, to prepare a series of online experiments to investigate the impact of various decision science techniques.
We also looked at the differences in gift levels at different times of day and across different platforms – especially contrasting mobile and laptop.
The results of the experiments included:
- Reducing the choice of gift options from five to three – this lessened the cognitive load and increased higher commitment to one of the options
- Creating greater salience for one donation choice by changing colour and including text and pictures to make it more prominent
- Including an online counter showing progress towards a specific daily goal – to show how individual gifts were helping
- Normalising key gift levels by showing that many existing supporters had given a similar level donation
The Impact
Some of the experiments succeeded remarkably well producing significantly higher returns than normal. Others seemed to make little difference. It’s important to stress that it’s in the nature of experiments that you are testing a hypothesis to discover what might work and what might not.
Following the overall success of the project =mc was contracted to work on a global case for support aimed at major donors, and to coach street fundraising teams to increase their success rate – and therefore income for the charity.
Next Steps?
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Clare Segal, Director
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