Best practices during the 2016 election included using pictures of Donald Trump with his thumbs up above practically all else for fundraising asks on his campaign website. | Getty Pictures of Trump’s thumbs up proved to be fundraising gold

The more often Donald Trump gave his supporters two thumbs up in 2016, the more they cracked open their wallets.

That’s one of many lessons the Republican National Committee’s digital experiment team learned in 2016 while testing and retesting everything about the Trump campaign’s website, down to the color of the “donate” buttons, according to a new report prepared by the RNC. The report estimates that the testing program run by the RNC’s Performance Optimization and Experiments Team — POET for short — brought in over $30 million extra to the Trump campaign by boosting its digital engagement and fundraising.


“The dynamic nature of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Campaign presented us with a wealth of copy, images and myriad digital assets,” wrote the report authors, a combination of RNC digital operatives and consultants with Giles-Parscale, Trump’s online consulting firm. “Our objective: find out how to best package and deliver our content to best engage potential.”

The best practices included using pictures of Trump with his thumbs up above practically all else for fundraising asks on his campaign website.

Five different “A/B” tests in the RNC report — in which Trump’s digital team changed one element of a page and then showed the different versions to website visitors simultaneously, to see which version performed better — showed that Trump’s website generated more online revenue per visitor when it used pictures of Trump giving two thumbs up next to fundraising asks, as opposed to other pictures.

“Supporters reacted to authentic, personal messages from their nominee,” wrote Michael Babyak, the RNC’s director of marketing technology, in a Medium post linking to the booklet.

That extended to the POET team’s testing of anti-Hillary Clinton messages on the Trump website’s donation pages, which generated less online money from visitors than images of just Trump in three tests covered in the report.

After the final presidential debate, the digital team created seven different versions of a splash page that temporarily replaced the website homepage, each featuring an embedded YouTube clip from the debate. Six of the videos featured a split screen of Trump and Clinton, but the one that produced a 24 percent lift in revenue, according to the report, was one that only showed visitors Trump, delivering his closing statement.

The testing team also experimented with adding extra language reassuring donors that their money was going to the official Trump campaign, around the time that an unaffiliated online group raised over $1 million promising “dinner with Trump” before the official campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter.

Adding the text “Official website of Donald J. Trump” to the donation box on the website resulted in an extra dollar of revenue per unique visitor, one test found, while another test showed that the more prominently the “official” notice was displayed, the better the performance was.

Other tests dove deep into the particulars of online fundraising apart from Trump’s image, and could potentially be useful to other campaigns looking for best practices but without the web traffic to perform such large-scale tests.

Besides the green donation buttons, the RNC team experimented with small things like adding the characters “>>” after “contribute” on donation buttons. For whatever reason, revenue lifted by 8 percent using the buttons with the arrow symbols. The experimenters found that adjusting the dollar amount of pre-set buttons on its donation pages would result in more revenue, but higher numbers worked better in some cases and lower ones worked better in other cases.

And the POET group confirmed past research by Democratic and Republican campaigns that the simpler it looks, the more likely donors are to give money. The Trump campaign got a big lift in revenue per visitor when it switched its mobile-site donation page from one long page to a multi-step page that broke the process of giving names, addresses, credit card information, and more into smaller chunks.

“The results speak for themselves: over $250 million raised in almost five months from over 2.5 million donors,” the report authors concluded. “To continue this success for the 2018 and 2020 cycles it is critical that the RNC and other political groups in the Trump orbit foster a high level of curiosity along with the organizational freedom to experiment and try new things.”

