Founded more than a century ago by the naturalist and conservationist John Muir, the Sierra Club has become a technological trailblazer in the digital environment.
Whereas the club’s founder tinkered with clocks and thermometers, its online strategists now test the building blocks of online fundraising: landing pages, email subject lines, and social media.
The results are striking: a 30.6-percent increase in online giving from 2012 to 2013. The year-to-year increase built on a 21-percent jump from 2011 to 2012.
The nonprofit also uses the Internet to boost activism among supporters, spurring millions to sign petitions, attend rallies, and contact elected officials to protect wildlife and fight against coal-fueled power plants and the Keystone XL pipeline.
Last year the organization started a three-person digital-innovation team and an online laboratory, SierraRise, to take its testing to the next level. The innovation team works in a virtual world. Spread across the country, team members communicate through video chats and online documents. It is part of the organization’s digital-engagement team, which handles both online fundraising and advocacy.
Employees test almost everything, sending fundraising and advocacy emails to a portion of the group’s supporters and analyzing how they respond to different subject lines, typefaces, text sizes, and layouts. The goal is to increase the number of people who open the email, read the content, donate, and take action.
“You only get one shot to get people to read it, understand, get the issue, and get involved in the campaign,” says Chris Thomas, the organization’s chief innovation officer, who previously worked for Fortune 500 companies and Greenpeace International.
Removing the ‘Donate’ Button
The nonprofit’s experiments have upended longstanding fundraising conventions.
For example, emails asking for contributions traditionally have a “donate” button positioned in a prominent location. The SierraRise team experimented by removing the button and embedding a donate link in the email text instead. Without the prominent button, donations increased 23 percent and 58 percent in a test that was conducted twice.
“Our theory on this test is when people see the donate button, they say, ‘Nevermind’ and close the email,” says Molly Brooksbank, the senior director of digital engagement, hired in January 2013. “If they don’t see it, they read it. It’s a crazy thing to try.”
Similarly, visitors to the Sierra Club’s home page made 26 percent more donations when the organization removed the word “donate” from the top navigation bar and replaced it with a “join/renew” option.
The new language made a difference because supporters think of themselves as members, so the words “join” and “renew” resonated more than “donate,” says Ms. Brooksbank.
The testing mind-set extends to the organization’s online advocacy.
The digital-innovation team replaced the standard “sign” button on its petition campaigns with a “sign & share” option. Fewer people followed through and clicked on the button, but the share action created wider distribution and attracted new activists. The experiment has helped the Sierra Club recruit 100,000 new activists since September.
The group’s approach to accelerating its online fundraising is an important example for other nonprofits, says Steve MacLaughlin, director of the Idea Lab at Blackbaud, a fundraising-software company.
“Analysis and research is extremely valuable to nonprofits, and the vast majority of them are ill-equipped to do so,” he says. The Sierra Club has “a culture of testing everything, and that culture is not something that’s in the DNA of every nonprofit organization.”
A commitment to the strategic use of technology to raise money and engage supporters starts at the top. Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, created the digital-strategies department in 2011.
“We have an executive team that puts a premium on testing, to be able to measure our results and adjust our strategy based on the results we’re seeing,” he says. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
The organization’s mantra, says Mr. Brune, is “Get good data. Do early testing, and adjust and adjust again and again and again.”
To appeal to new audiences, the Sierra Club is using the SierraRise site to run email and social-media campaigns on topics that extend beyond its traditional issues of clean air and clean water. For example, it has promoted petition drives to compel Google to stop donating to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank that promotes free markets and limited government, and to support Internet neutrality.
“We want to get younger people, more diverse people, people who are representative of the country now,” says Mr. Thomas.
Improvements in the organization’s technology will give it more power to tailor appeals.
This month, the Sierra Club integrated the information from its internal databases into a central location, which will allow the organization to see all of the data it has about an individual in one place and segment its supporters into groups based on their interests and behavior.
“We’ll have a better way to tell what issues people are interested in, how they like to engage, what they are doing,” says Mr. Brune. “We can direct our appeals or calls to action based on that person’s interests.”
The Sierra Club’s willingness to risk failure has been key to its success online, says Ms. Brooksbank.
“If we want to engage people over the long term,” she says, “we really need to create that space to play a little bit, to get outside of our structures, to be willing to fail, to take on a project and say we’re going to test something and if it doesn’t succeed, it was a success because of what we learned.”
The digital-innovation team touts its work as a complement to the traditional, boots-on-the-ground advocacy the Sierra Club has led for 122 years. Online supporters are encouraged to participate in rallies and town-hall meetings and legislative hearings. Their actions are recorded, analyzed, and used to shape future campaigns.
“When you talk to a group of people, you look for a head nod of understanding. You naturally do a message test,” says Michael Grenetz, the former director of digital innovation who left the Sierra Club in April. “You do the same thing in email and social media, looking for that digital head nod.”
