Tag Archives: AB testing

[Meetup] Prove It! A Practical Guide to A/B Testing for Nonprofits – December 4, 2012

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What types of stories best engage your audience? How can you best move your supporters to action? Why do people give to your organization? By performing some simple A/B tests you can start to get the answers to these questions (and more) that can help you shape your marketing, communications and fundraising strategies. Brady presents a practical guide to A/B testing with a sample process, tool recommendations and a case study of a real A/B test.

RSVP on Meetup.com

When: Tuesday, December 4, 2012, 5:30 PM To 7:30 PM

Where: W2 Media Cafe, 111 W Hastings, Vancouver, BC

RSVP on Meetup.com

Agenda

  • 5:30 – 6:00 pm: schmoozing
  • 6:00 – 7:00 pm: Brady Josephson knocks your socks off
  • 7:00 – 7:30 pm: Q&A

Brady Josephson

Brady is currently the Strategic Director at Charity Express, a Vancouver based digital agency serving small and medium sized nonprofit organizations. He’s a Board Member of The Seacrest Foundation (not affiliated with Ryan…), an Adjunct Professor of fundraising at North Park University and blogs often at recharity.ca and less often on The Huffington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bradyjosephson.

Our sponsor

Net Tuesday is thrilled to have the W2 Media Cafe as our venue sponsor for the 2012-2013 season. They do cool things. Check them out!

A-B testing in an email campaign

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September’s Net Tuesday brought up a lot of questions about best practices for email campaigning.

Long or short subject lines? One ask or newsletter style? Weekly or monthly? Text or HTML layouts?

Now I may not be a grizzled old veteran yet, but I’ve already seen that “best practices” for one organization may not necessarily be the optimal strategy for everyone else. So, you have two choices when developing your email campaigns:

  1. you can guess
  2. you can test

I suggest test! It’s fast and easy with most email service providers.

Example using Mailchimp (but almost any major service will do)

NOTE: this was not a statistically valid experiment because of the small size of the test group. I did this as a test of Mailchimp’s functionality and to show how easy it is to setup an A/B test.

I setup an A/B test on the from field of a recent invitation to the Vancouver Net Tuesday group (instructions). The test sent the two variants of the email to a random 30% of the total list, and then after 24 hours automatically sent the winning variant of the email (based on open and clickthru rates) to the rest of the mailing list.

  • Group A: NetSquared Camp
  • Group B: Eli from Net Tuesday

And here’s the stats on the test. In this case “Group B” won with the more personal “Eli from Net Tuesday” from line.

As the French say, “et voilà!”