Those are the basics behind the anchoring effect. Would changing the order of suggested donation amounts get you that much? More? It’s worth knowing, and doing the A/B testing to find out couldn’t be easier. If your website pulls in $500,000 in donations, four percent is $20,000. Do you have a page where people can donate on your website? Does it look like this?Ĭhanging the order of the beer on a menu results in an additional four percent in revenue. Research shows that this finding generalizes to other contexts. The initial prices serve as anchors that influence their eventual choice. In the high-to-low list, they see the higher priced beers first. Why does this happen? People read the prices of the beers from top to bottom. Thanks to doing nothing more than presenting the choices in a certain order, the bar makes an average of $0.24 more every time someone orders a beer. Researchers presented the beer menu to customers based on price in two ways: from low to high and from high to low.
Psychologists tested that claim in a bar. For example, you can influence people to pick a higher price (think: donation) depending on how their choices are sorted. There are many tactics nonprofits can employ that leverage the anchoring effect. One example is the “door-in-the-face technique.” In a 1975 study, researchers asked a group of students to volunteer as camp counselors two hours per week for two years. Not surprisingly, all said no. The researchers followed up by asking if they would volunteer to supervise a single two-hour trip. Half said yes. Without first asking for the two-year commitment, only 17 percent agreed. Like most psychological phenomenon, anchoring can be used to influence people to do good. Does that seem rational? Of course not.” Door-in-the-Face Technique Any question, in fact, would have created the anchor. We could have just as well asked for the current temperature or the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. If the two numbers were 88, the cordless trackball was $88.Īfter they wrote down the pretend price, they bid. The anchoring effect profoundly influenced the way they judged the value of the items. People with high social security numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with low numbers. People with numbers from 80 to 99 paid on average $26 for the trackball, while those with 00 to 19 paid around $9.Īriely explains, “Social security numbers were the anchor in this experiment only because we requested them. If the last two digits were 11, the bottle of wine was priced at $11.
The researchers would hold up a bottle of wine, a textbook or a cordless trackball and then describe in detail how awesome it was. Then each student had to write down the last two digits of their own social security number as if it was the price of the item. Subjects were asked to bid on items in an auction. In his book, “ Predictably Irrational,” Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes an experiment conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The extent to which humans are influenced by the presence of numbers-any numbers-is almost beyond belief. Whatever number you show to people will have a significant impact on their eventual fundraising (or donation). What does this mean for your nonprofit? The decision that nonprofits want to influence is how much money people fundraise (or donate).
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