Think about the last time you spent money online. Maybe you were buying a new swimsuit, or you found a book on Amazon that looked intriguing, or maybe you donated to a friend’s fundraising campaign so that she could run a marathon for her favorite charity. Was your purchase impulsive or pre-planned? How did you decide to spend that particular amount of money? What factors were important to you in making your decision?

We talked about choices in our e-book "The Participant Gears: Understanding Why People Participate in Peer-to-Peer", and discussed the three different factors that influence people to participate in a peer-to-peer fundraising program. But let’s take a deeper look at some of the behavioral principles surrounding how your audience makes choices online, so that you can apply these principles in a way that helps you and your constituents make a greater difference in the world.

Four Behavioral Psychology Lessons For Nonprofit Web Design

We often don't realize it, but elements of behavioral psychology and "choice architecture" are constantly informing the choices we make, from the displays at the supermarket to the color of the "Purchase Now!" button on a website. The White House even has a "Nudge Unit," modeled after the UK's Behavioral Insights Team, with the goal of using simple social experiments to accomplish everything from lowering energy consumption to increasing tax collection.

These days, however, choice architecture is more likely to be used by ecommerce companies than nonprofits or government agencies. Using well-chosen defaults, social norming, anchoring, and other tactics, ecommerce companies consistently guide consumers towards their desired purchasing decisions.

As someone focused on fundraising, understanding the principles behind behavioral psychology can help you design your website so that your constituents make the choice you want them to make. Here are four principles of behavioral psychology that you can use on your website to "nudge" your visitors towards your desired conversion.

Anchoring

Your audience doesn't always know how much time or money they should invest when it comes to donating and fundraising, and when this happens, they inevitably (and subconsciously) turn to context clues to help them make their decision.

In one experiment on anchoring, consumers were given a choice between a $170 camera and a $240 camera; preferences were evenly split between the two. However, when a $470 camera was thrown into the mix, the majority (57%) then preferred the $240 camera, while the two extremes were equally chosen. The point is that by providing the right options to your audience you can strategically impact their decision-making. In this case, the addition of the third camera option would have led to a 33% increase in profits for the company.

For a fundraising program, the clearest application of anchoring is simple: add an "extreme" at the top end of your fundraising program. And while you're tinkering with your numbers, consider that research shows that using 'precise' numbers in anchors generally results in a better outcome. For example, instead of offering donation options of $50 and $100, you should experiment with suggested donations of $57, $125, and a top-end anchor of $559. (Ideally, those numbers will be rooted in an aspect of your mission and will have some relevance to what you do.) In our work at Plenty we often tinker with donation pages in this way. Your constituents might not feel comfortable making the highest suggested donation, and may not want to look ungenerous by choosing the lowest option, so by adding a higher extreme you can make the middle option more attractive by comparison.