Monthly Report - November 2015

P2P Update

Much of our time over November has been directed to our peer-to-peer fundraising program, in particular, making preparations for the ‘Donate Your Christmas’ fundraiser. We have been conducting donor stewardship with our past peer-to-peer donors to investigate retention rates. We have also worked on providing training and assistance to our fundraisers. Notably, we discerned that offering to set-up campaign pages for people and then provide them the log-in details substantially increased follow-through. We have also made various tweaks and improvements to the CauseVox platform for this year’s fundraiser. We have also worked to notify potential fundraisers about matching possibilities and pair matchers with campaigns. The peer-to-peer fundraiser has been advertised through contact with student groups, posts to Facebook and the EA Newsletter. We have also published posts to the Huffington Post and Patheos (which have been shared almost 300 times and liked almost 200 times respectively).
A full report on the impact of the Christmas fundraiser will follow early in the new year.

Experiments Update 

Skeptics for Charity

The SFC experiment continued during the course of November. We published a number of articles on the Huffington Post and the SFC blog, and posted these to around 40 skeptic or atheist specific Facebooks groups to increase traffic, as well as reaching out personally to other skeptic-oriented groups and individuals. We have continued to update our website and online content in response to Google Analytics and adjustments to our Google Adwords. We have also run A/B testing of pitches aimed at soliciting regular donations versus long-term pledges due to the slow take-up of pledges noted last month, (which we speculated in October may be too big an initial ask).
The results of this experiment so far have not been positive. Full details and our evaluation of the project can be found in our full report here.

Legacy Fundraising

We have continued to receive significant interest from a number of individuals and organisations. Our legacy services are still currently suspended, however, while we research different options for taking this forward. At present, we are looking into the possibility of collaboration with a variety of legal companies in order to provide the service. One question to address is how best to deal with the legal requirements of different jurisdictions. We expect negotiations with different legal firms to continue into the early new year, but are optimistic that we will be able to reach agreement on a viable solution.

Recruitment
​
Our team of interns and volunteers is now the largest it has ever been. We have been pleasantly surprised by the contribution they have been able to make so far on tasks ranging from data-mining, article-writing, and content design for our peer-to-peer campaign.