How The Van Gogh Museum Doubled Their Online Donation Income
This article highlights key takeaways from a speech given by the Van Gogh Museum during the recent MuseumNext Digital Summit. The event, while focused on museums, provided actionable advice that’s easily applied at any other type of cultural institutions.
Fransje Pansters, Digital Communication Advisor, and Myriam Bruijne, Team Manager of Ticketing, at the Van Gogh Museum shared tips on how they managed to double their online donation income with a few structural changes in 2019.
1. Start Small
The first key to success is to adopt a working method that allows you to operate in short learning cycles: build small goals and assess what you need to do next once you reach those small goals, instead of setting a very ambitious goal at the beginning. The advantage of working with a succession of small goals is that you gain more flexibility and adaptability, and also more motivation and satisfaction through the process. Members - you can find more about creating a test-and-learn system from our Key Success Factors for Your Recovery meeting series in late 2020
2. Rely On Data
As for visitors or audience development, it is crucial to collect data on donors’ needs, behaviors and interests in order to define your online donation strategy and design your donation page. The Van Gogh Museum used a tool called BlueConic to collect data on users and go beyond what Google Analytics can provide.
And this is the data on donations the Museum gathered with BlueConic :
Nationalities who donate the most are Americans, Dutch, British, Germans, and Italians.
Most popular amounts of donation are 1 euros, 2 euros and 5 euros (knowing that it was an open field).
When do people give donations the most: when there is a special exhibition.
3. Use A/B Testing
The collection of data allowed the museum to improve several things :
CDP (Customer Data Platform): BlueConic is a collection of software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.
A/B testing: it is a marketing technique that consists of proposing several variants of the same object that differ according to a single criterion (for example, the headline) in order to determine the version that gives the best results to consumers.
Personalization and segmentation: once you have information on users, and that you tested what kind of call to action is more effective, it is very easy to proceed to a segmentation of your online donors and to personalize your communication.
Campaign management: a concentrated marketing effort is usually focused on a singular, consistent marketing message spread across several channels and is meant to achieve a specific business goal.
The effectiveness of A/B testing was clear for the Van Gogh Museum: as soon as they started using it in June 2019, online donation income doubled compared to 2018 (see graph below).
The lessons they learned using A/B testing in 2019:
People don’t want to get more explanations on why you need donations when the donation page is in the ticketing funnel.
Dutch people differ from other donors because they have a national attachment to the Museum.
Some people donate before going to the museum.
Creating buttons with set amounts is much more effective than leaving an open field. When the minimum donation is 2 euros, people who might only have donated 1 euro are encouraged to double the amount in a subtle way.
Fluctuations in donations across the year will always happen.
Last year, the covid crisis obliged the museum to create a new donation page that is not linked to the ticketing page. Results and lessons learned from this experiment:
Donations are strongly related to visits. There was less conversion on the new donation page compared to the previous one.
However, they could be more flexible about the amount on the buttons -- and increased them - because there were no tickets to buy.
When donation is disconnected from tickets, donors need more explanation about why to donate.
They noticed that they attract more donations when new restrictions or reopening dates for museums are communicated in the news.
4. Take Advantage of Free Tools
While the Van Gogh Museum used a sophisticated, proprietary data analysis tool, Fransje Pansters, the digital communication advisor of the museum, pointed out that there are myriad other tools that are less costly.
For example you can use Google Analytics to define measurable ‘what if’ questions: what if you change headlines, images, or button design and color? Does it impact the open rate, conversion rate, click through rate, or abandonment? There are many tools offering a free trial like VWO for A/B tests or Hotjar for heat maps and user behaviour insights.