Finding Watsi’s EngineBenn Stancil

March 4, 2015 Hi, I’m Benn Stancil, Chief Analyst at Mode.

March 4, 2015 First, a quick bit about Mode.

March 4, 2015 Mode is a collaborative analytics platform…

March 4, 2015 …designed to help analysts write SQL (against things like Segment)…

March 4, 2015 ..do analysis…

March 4, 2015 …make interactive reports and dashboards…

March 4, 2015 …and share them with their coworkers.

March 4, 2015 But I’m not here to talk about Mode. I’m here to talk about Watsi, and how we can help what they’re doing. When I spoke to Watsi a couple months ago, they said they were focused on growth. They want more donors. They want more donations.

March 4, 2015 They want to find their growth engine.

March 4, 2015 So I started by doing research. First here.

March 4, 2015 Then here.

March 4, 2015 And I found this. If you’re looking for an engine, a spike like this is a pretty good place to start. What caused this spike?

March 4, 2015 So, I dug in. This is Mode’s query editor.

March 4, 2015 Here, you can see Segment SQL schema.

March 4, 2015 And here’s the table we’re after

March 4, 2015 So we write a quick query

March 4, 2015 You can see we’re looking at traffic by referrer, on the day the spike happened.

March 4, 2015 And we run the query!

March 4, 2015 So, direct traffic (email) was one big source of traffic.

Email works

(we know)

March 4, 2015 What does this tell us? Email blasts work.

Email works

(we know)

March 4, 2015 But we know that.

March 4, 2015 Hacker News was also a big driver of traffic.

March 4, 2015 It came from this post. But all of us know that the sites like Hacker News and Tech Crunch and drive tons of traffic.

Hacker News is not an engine

March 4, 2015 But Hacker News is not an engine. It spikes, and disappears.

Is the tech community an engine?March 4, 2015 Still, we’ve learned something. The tech community responded well to Watsi. That might be a place we can focus.

March 4, 2015 But we haven’t really learned a lot. Let’s go back to this. That increase after the spike is pretty good too. So what might that be?

March 4, 2015 A big part of this came from gift cards. In addition to launching gift cards, several other companies partnered with Watsi to promote them.

March 4, 2015 Companies like these.

March 4, 2015 But Segment’s promotion, which was to give away $20 to 1,000 people, struck me as particularly interesting.

March 4, 2015 It reminded me of something else. From Paypal. But not this Paypal.

March 4, 2015 But from this PayPal. Old school PayPal. Back before eBay.

March 4, 2015 Paypal famously gave everyone $10 when they signed up. Why? They knew that they’d pay it back to PayPal eventually. People signed up like crazy.

March 4, 2015 Paypal found their engine.

March 4, 2015 Segment gave $20 Watsi gift cards to anyone who wanted to claim one.

?March 4, 2015 Could that be similar? Could this work like Paypal’s $10?

What happens after spending Segment’s

gift cards?March 4, 2015 To answer this, we need to know what people do next.

March 4, 2015 People can do two things. First, they could give money to other patients. Like Carlos.

March 4, 2015 So do people give more donations?

295 people gave $6,013

March 4, 2015 Well, 295 people claimed and spent their Segment gift cards, and they donated $6,013.

295 x $20 = $5,900

March 4, 2015 But they were given $20. So $5900 came from Segment.

+$113

March 4, 2015 They only added $113 total.

$113 is not an engine

March 4, 2015 That’s not an engine.

But, what about the UF?

March 4, 2015 But what about the Universal Fund? People can also give to the Universal Fund, a recurring, monthly donation.

March 4, 2015 After all, that’s what this is.

March 4, 2015 So, let’s see how many of these Segment folks signed up for the Universal Fund.

March 4, 2015 You can see we added this UF contribution table here.

March 4, 2015 And here are the results.

10 people gave $261

March 4, 2015 10 people contributed $261.

$261 is not an engine

March 4, 2015 Nope. Not an engine.

March 4, 2015 But this happens every month. It’s recurring. So it’s not only $261.

10

March 4, 2015 To know how much it actually is, we need to know how many of the original 10 donors from January…

10 ? ? ?

? ? ? ?

? ? ? ?March 4, 2015 …stick around each month.

March 4, 2015 So let’s figure it out. We go back to Mode.

March 4, 2015 Run the query.

March 4, 2015 Retention rates are pretty high.

96-97%

Monthly Retention

March 4, 2015 96-97% high.

10x

donated in 1 year

March 4, 2015 That means that over a year, the 10 donors will donate 10x the initial contribution.

17x

donated in 2 years

March 4, 2015 17x in 2 yrs.

22x

donated in 3 years

March 4, 2015 22x in 3 yrs.

$261

$4,437March 4, 2015 So, let’s go back to the original number. $261. Segment donors created $261 worth of UF contributions.

$261

$4,437over 2 years

March 4, 2015 But over two years, that $261 becomes $4437.

74% on top of the $6,000 spent

March 4, 2015 That’s 74% of original donation! That’s pretty good!

That might be

an engine

March 4, 2015 It might be an engine.

March 4, 2015 But if it is, it’s a small one.

March 4, 2015 How do we make it bigger?

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 There are three stages where we can improve.

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 The first is getting more people.

March 4, 2015 But how? Well, easy.

March 4, 2015 Split the money. Instead of 1000 gift cards, give 2000 $10 gift cards.

March 4, 2015 If you’re aren’t impressed with this idea, you shouldn’t be.

Won’t they be less likely to convert?

March 4, 2015 After all, lower donations might lead to lower conversion rates.

March 4, 2015 As it turns out, they don’t. For non-Segment gift cards, there’s little relationship between the conversion rate to the Universal Fund and the gift card amount.

Won’t they donate less?March 4, 2015 But even if they donate at the same rate, people getting smaller gift cards might contribute less.

March 4, 2015 That’s not the case either. For modest sized gift cards, people getting smaller gift cards actually give more.

March 4, 2015 So that means splitting the money…

March 4, 2015 Might yield the same UF contributions as giving twice as much.

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 What about the second stage? Convert more often?

What makes people convert?

March 4, 2015 One way to do this is to see what makes people convert

March 4, 2015 We put together something at Mode that can help. It’s called Mode Playbook. It’s a collection of reports to answer common questions around retention, churn, and other metrics important to many businesses.

March 4, 2015 One report looks at what drives retention. It asks which actions correlate most closely with users retaining.

March 4, 2015 It’s like a famous study done by Facebook. Facebook found that getting 7 friends in 10 days makes you a Facebook user for life. This report finds your 7 friends metric. For Watsi, let’s see what actions make people give to the Universal Fund.

March 4, 2015 We plug the Watsi data into the report.

March 4, 2015 And see what correlates most strongly with giving to the Universal Fund.

Show the

Universal Fund

March 4, 2015 We learn two things. First, we should show people the Universal Fund when they redeem a gift card. Show them they can continue to contribute.

Show more patients

March 4, 2015 And show them more patients. Put a human face on their donation.

Send more email

March 4, 2015 But that’s not the only thing we can do. There are other ways to increase the number of conversions. Remember, email works. So get people’s email. Re-engage them. Send them emails about the universal fund. Send them emails about patients.

Segment (the verb)

March 4, 2015 Another way is segment.

Segment (the verb)

March 4, 2015 But segment, the verb. It’s about who gets the gift cards.

March 4, 2015 This shows the Universal Fund conversion rate, split by the type of gift card people are redeeming.

2xMarch 4, 2015 The conversion rate for people using the Segment gift card is 2x higher than other gift cards.

Segment (the company?)

March 4, 2015 So maybe it is Segment the company?

March 4, 2015 It’s not. It’s self-selection bias.

Segment’s gift cards required

workMarch 4, 2015 Segment’s gift cards are claimed. The people have to go to the Watsi site to get them. So relative to people who were just given a gift card, they are more likely to be passionate about Watsi. And more likely to keep donating.

The right people, not the first people

March 4, 2015 The lesson here is important. The goal is not to give gift cards away as quickly as possible, but to give them to the people who are most likely to keep giving.

March 4, 2015 This is analogous to the upcoming final Grateful Dead show. How did they ensure the most passionate fans go to the show? They make fans draw elaborate art on the envelope to get tickets. The best envelopes - the most dedicated fans - got tickets.

Make gift cards hard to claim

March 4, 2015 So what can Watsi do? Make gift cards harder to claim. Make people enter personal info, or even credit card info. It’s somewhat counter intuitive. But to get more return on donation, weed out the people you don’t think you can upsell. The people unwilling to give you that info.

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 Finally, what about the third step?

March 4, 2015 You might even be able to make that better. Right now, there’s no suggestion for this donation.

$50

March 4, 2015 Frame it. Make it higher. $50?

$75

March 4, 2015 $75?

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 So where does this leave us?

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 Well, if we get more people

March 4, 2015 We can double the number of people contributing

74% on top of the $6,000 spent

March 4, 2015 Meaning that this original return…

148% on top of the $6,000 spent

March 4, 2015 Could double, to nearly 150% on top of what was already donated.

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 What about the other two steps?

More people

Convert more often

Give more

money

March 4, 2015 If we increase conversion rates by a few percentage points and get them to give more money, we can add another 40-50% return.

200%? on top of the $6,000 spent

March 4, 2015 Meaning Watsi could collect up to an additional 200% on top of the original contribution.

March 4, 2015 It’s a promising lead. But there’s a final caveat. It’s a small sample.

We need more data

March 4, 2015 We need more data.

We need more Segments

March 4, 2015 Which means, we need more donors like Segment.

March 4, 2015 One of the great things about Watsi is this 100% guarantee. 100% of donations go directly to health care.

Corporate giving

March 4, 2015 But with smart corporate giving

Watsi community

March 4, 2015 Combined with the generosity of the Watsi community, who can turn those corporate donations into regular Universal Fund contributions

Watsi platform

March 4, 2015 Combined with the Watsi platform to connect corporate donors to the community to healthcare providers and patients

March 4, 2015 We can turn the 100% guarantee

300%

March 4, 2015 Into a 300% guarantee. 100% of corporate donations don’t go to fund life changing health care - 300% does.

That’s an engine

March 4, 2015 That’s an engine.