Building one of the largest NGOs fighting extreme poverty by shipping hundreds of A/B experiments
Executive Summary
SP Invisível documents the lives of people in extreme poverty.
For 2 years, I was responsible for their entire product strategy, including user research, design, and marketing.
- Revenue Growth (YoY)
- +98%
- Social Media Following
- +724K
- Conversion Rate Growth
- +42%
Problem
Despite an increasing awareness of social inequality through social media, revenue stagnated.
- Market ShareWe received 3% of all donations in Brazil
- Conversion RateLess than 4% of our website visitors would donate
- Recurring RevenueJust 15% of donors adopted subscription models
Research
Because we lacked time and resources to conduct user interviews, my process focused on analyzing unmoderated product data (e.g., CTR) through A/B experiments. Here’s what we learned:
Emotional appeal is the primary driver of conversion
76%Particularly, customers highlighted emotional appeal after exposure to individual stories of poverty
68%Preliminary experiments showed a doubling of ticket size
2.1x
Results
Launching hundreds of A/B experiments allowed us to optimize every step in the funnel with minimal investment in research.
Moreover, it allowed us to identify and prioritize successful strategies, such as clipping distribution marketing, which consisted of mass-producing 1,342 social media posts telling the individual stories of people in extreme poverty.
“Julio Caggiano’s work allowed us to reach hundreds of thousands of followers and raise $1.2M organically.
For context, in two years, his product design and marketing insights generated more revenue than seven years of other fundraising initiatives since we founded the NGO”
“Julio Caggiano’s work allowed us to reach hundreds of thousands of followers and raise $1.2M organically.”
- Social Media Followers
- +724K
- Revenue Growth (YoY)
- +98%
If you’ve come this far,Let’s grab a virtual coffee
For new projects, partnerships, and collaborations, contact me via e-mail.
julio@uni.minerva.eduCredits
- André SolerFounder and CEO
- Bruno TabetGeneral Manager
- Gisleide TeixeiraSocial Assistant
- Lukas JuhlerPhotography
- Giovana MarquesCopywriter
- Nathalia de PaulaProject Manager
- FutureBrandExecutive Direction
- Fabio Haag, Ana Laydner Henrique Beier, Eduílson CorreaTypography
- Vinícius Cambruzzi, Gabrielle RufatoCopywriting
- Marina Rufino, Gabriel Daher, Isabella Concilio, Larissa HeszBrand Strategy
- iF Design AwardAwards
- 2 yearsProject Timeline
Reflection
When I joined the organization, we were a team of only three people. Notably, our main struggle was to achieve monetization with limited capital and human resources.
I had to think about the whole journey, from the first step in the funnel to the decision to donate. For that, I launched hundreds of A/B experiments to help us validate our hypotheses about where to focus, based on actionable data.
With that, a pattern emerged: individual stories of people experiencing poverty were among our highest-performing content formats and brought in more donations than any alternative marketing strategy. I doubled down on that approach, and we were fortunate to collect the results of that insight at the height of the pandemic, when people in extreme poverty needed our help the most.
If given the opportunity to work on this problem again, I would also focus on customer interviews. I believe behavioral data is incredibly valuable to understand patterns. Nevertheless, there is a magic side of product discovery research that you can only achieve by going out in the field and talking to people. I like to call that customer empathy.
