How do we decrease the clutter and increase the donations?

Action Against Malaria have one of the most compelling propositions around: all donated monies are used to purchase nets. They are unique among charities in this regard. They also focus on the biggest killer of children in the world – malaria.

So why is their website not performing better?

They came to us knowing their online presentation was too cluttered. We fixed it.

We took advantage of the three most common non-rational behavioural quirks:
1. Framing
2. Loss Aversion
3. Social norms

1. Framing, or 1. What’s the problem?
The framing effect says that how data are presented can significantly change people’s behaviour. Global ad agency JWT have already made a film dramatising the fact that the equivalent of 7 jumbo jets full of children die of malaria everyday. A perfect frame

because the ‘plane crash’ implication takes advantage of our zero-risk bias which sees us fear small catastrophic risk – like a plane crash – over a larger reduction in a more likely risk.

(This is why more Americans drove instead of flew after 9/11 – to remove the tiny risk of hijack. US road deaths increased during this period.)

2. Loss Aversion, or 2. What we do about it
We feel the pain of loss twice as much as the pleasure of a gain of equal size (- losing a tenner hurts more than finding a tenner). Because of this we talk about how you waste money with other charities.

We do this overtly, ‘…other charities you waste some of your donation on costs…’, and covertly ‘…every penny of your donation we buy…’.

3. Social norms, or 3. What people say about us
No one wants to be the weirdo in a group – so most of us follow others’ actions. So we showed visitors that it’s normal and popular to donate here with rolling quotations and number references: The more you can create the impression that everyone is donating, the more people will start donating. It’s a positive spiral. Or a social norm…

We designed the look and feel of a low-energy product retailer. This included all the logos, page layouts including copy-writing, email templates and content, and strategies to increase sales.

The homepage banners promoting products (above) had quotes pulled from national newspapers. The quote was expressed in as close to a handwritten font as possible to indicate – before you’ve understood the words – that it’s from a human (like you). The provenance is expressed as a logotype, not a name. We know that these forms are understood by our ‘gut reaction’, or system one thinking, more quickly than our ‘thinking brain’, or system two thinking. The speed of cognition is important because that defines our anchor point, and it’s this instant reaction that is then used as a measuring-rule for the later ‘thinking brain’ inputs.

Similarly, in the product page to the left we framed a value of reducing electricity consumption by ‘500 times less’ as the the difference between the distance to the local shops and the distance from London to Edinburgh. Framing, anchoring, and the use of boundary ordering devices in the presentation of products uses our hidden quirks and apparent irrationalities in favour of increasing the likelihood of a sale.