Now we’ll be extending free donation processing for another year, until January 1, 2011, for those non-profits who are also members of our Google Grants program. All other non-profits will continue to process donations according to Checkout's standard fee structure.
If your organization is already a Google Grants recipient using Checkout to process donations, please make sure you have linked your Grants account with Checkout. If you’re not a Google Grants recipient and you meet the guidelines for the program, we strongly encourage you to apply.
In addition, we thought we’d share some data we collected about the default donation amount on one of our disaster relief donation drives on Google.com. We discussed internally whether the default donation amount should be left blank, made as high as $100 to increase the total amount collected, kept at $20 because people in the U.S. are accustomed to getting $20 bills from ATMs, or increased to $50 because it's close to the national giving average. In typical Google style we ran a few A/B experiments, randomly showing users different suggested donation amounts, in order to determine which amount would result in the greatest number of donations (or transactions) and total amount of donations collected.
First we compared leaving the donation amount blank, suggesting a $20 donation, and suggesting $100. We quickly saw that $20 was sub-optimal, resulting in fewer transactions and a lower total amount collected.
| Suggested Donation | Transactions (normalized) | Total Collected (normalized) |
| Blank | 100 | $100 |
| $20 | 89.8 | $59 |
| $100 | 78.2 | $83 |
Next we tried testing a $50 suggestion instead of $20. Again, having a suggested donation amount less than $100 was sub-optimal.
| Suggested Donation | Transactions (normalized) | Total Collected (normalized) |
| Blank | 100 | $100 |
| $50 | 85.3 | $95 |
| $100 | 84.3 | $105 |
At this point, we decided to compare leaving the donation amount blank with a suggested amount of $100, which had been giving mixed results.
| Suggested Donation | Transactions (normalized) | Total Collected (normalized) |
| Blank | 100 | $100 |
| $100 | 83.9 | $97 |
Our conclusion from this data was that leaving the suggested donation amount blank seemed to result in the greatest number of donations and the total amount of donations collected. Of course, every organization will have its own unique results, but we’d encourage you to run these experiments for your organization as well!
Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager and Patrick Moor, Software Engineer