Salespeople have an old adage: always be closing. On a recent episode of RelishTHIS, data expert Matt Ranta of Nimble Gravity offered the version that actually grows a modern organization: always be testing.
The discipline is simple and it’s the part people skip: change one thing at a time. A bigger donate button. A different color. One fewer field on your form. Change only that, watch what happens, keep the winner, then test the next thing. Matt’s teams have lifted donations 50 percent this way – not with a genius insight, but with relentless one-variable experiments.
And here’s the part that matters for smaller nonprofits: you don’t need a huge audience for this. If your traffic is too low for true statistical significance, don’t get paralyzed – judge by your core numbers instead. Did you make a change and your bounce rate, conversion rate, and average gift stay the same or get better? Keep it and move on. Tools like Google Optimize let you start for free.
Two more gems from our conversation. First, find the gap between the real world and your website. Matt once noticed certain European countries thriving through field sales but converting online at under half a percent. The hypothesis: the site was English-only. Translating into six languages raised contributions 32 percent. The real world tells you where your website is quietly failing – go find the anomaly and test the fix. Second, profile your ideal donor with data. You’re sitting on donor records; mine them to see who your best supporters are and where they place their attention, then use inexpensive tools like SparkToro or Audiense to find more people just like them.
And when you inevitably fall down a data rabbit hole, remember Matt’s reminder that done is better than great – know when to stop analyzing and go act. As he put it, everything you do is an experiment, and an experiment implies both success and failure. Both are how you learn.
So here’s your one action: go run a test this week. Change one thing on your site and watch what happens.
Want to know where to point that energy first? Mission Uncomfortable is free at missionuncomfortablebook.com, and your Purpose-Driven Marketing Score can be calculated at relishstudio.com/purpose-driven-marketing-scorecard. And, as always, if you need some help, give us a shout.
