We talk to Kevin Conroy, Chief Product Officer of Global Giving about A/B testing with Optimizely and discuss how to think about testing your site. Then discuss how the Obama digital team used A/B testing to drive an extra $60 Million in donations.

More about the Behavior Model from Dr. BJ Fogg

Episode 4

This is using the whole whale, a podcast that brings you stories about data and technology in the nonprofit world. My name is George Weiner, your host, and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com, thanks for joining us.

So I learned a ton at NTEN, it isn’t always from the sessions that I attend but the people that I speak with. In this particular case I got a chance to speak to Kevin Conroy the chief product officer of Global Giving. And in this conversation it was interesting because his example of rolling out Optimizely and ab testing software for websites, perfectly demonstrated the idea that in the relationship of people process and product, just having the right product in place sometimes is just not enough to institute the type of behavioral change in an organization that you’re trying to affect. So let’s hear a bit more from kevin in this quick interview.

George: How’s it going? This is George Weiner at NTEN the 2014 conference, and I am here with Kevin from Global Giving. Kevin, can you tell us what you do at Global Giving?

Kevin: I’m the chief product officer at Global Giving, so I’m in charge of all the technology and marketing and Global Giving is an non profit that helps other nonprofits crowd fund in 140 countries around the world.

George: So these guys are the go to if you’re trying to do the online crowd giving. They’ve been in the game for quite sometime. but what really caught my attention today was how, Kevin you’re tackling AB testing, kevin why don’t you tell us about how you’re rolling out AB testing in your organization…

Kevin: So we had a lot of feedback from staff, that they wanted to do a lot more testing and iteration on our website, and they wanted to do it much more quickly and frequently, and they felt that they were hindered by the bandwidth or lack of bandwidth of our technical developers to be able to do all the testing that they wanted. So at the great advice of George, we got, a couple months ago, Optimizely installed. Optimizely is a great service that lets you very quickly and visually set up AB testing on your website, and then launch them. Optimizely handles all the heavy lifting of actually serving up the different pages, and most importantly doing the analysis. so it will tell you when you have hit statistical significance. Which is one of the biggest problems of AB testing, what has won and when can you determine that. Because it takes a fair amount of math to do that. which can be kind of daunting for most folks. So, Optimizely just wraps that up into a beautiful package, that’s very simple to use. So we rolled that out to our organization our staff of thirty, and