Two months after we launched momoGood Adaptive Testing, more than 60% of adopter broadcasts were running A/B tests.
That number is worth sitting with — because most of these teams rarely tested before momoGood made it effortless. Not for lack of belief. In most tools, a simple A/B test never survives the calendar: creating tags, building separate broadcasts, segmenting audiences by hand, waiting on results, copy-pasting the winner to everyone else. So teams picked the version they believed in and hoped. Sometimes they were right. Either way, the send taught them nothing.
What changed was not the belief. It was the friction. Adaptive Testing puts A/B and A/B/n testing — two versions, or several — directly inside momoGood Messaging: create your variants in the composer — a different title, image, tone, or call to action — and send. momoGood runs the test, identifies the winner, and delivers it, automatically or with your review. Testing stopped being a side project managed around the campaign and became how the message goes out.
And when testing is one click instead of one more project, teams use it — our customers proved that in eight weeks. Because every test points at the same goal: more supporters moved to act, and more raised from every send. Here is what that looks like, and how to run your first one.
The numbers so far
60%+ of adopter broadcasts used A/B Testing within two months of launch. The platform supports A/B and A/B/n testing — two versions or several — built right into the composer. And nearly every winning test on momoGood follows the same formula: two variants, one meaningful change.
Why most nonprofits don't test (and why that's expensive)
The nonprofit sector has long understood that testing matters. The Nonprofit Times has reported that organizations with structured testing programs consistently outperform those without them in key fundraising metrics. Yet most organizations still don't test their messaging in any systematic way.
The reasons are practical, not philosophical. A typical A/B test in a legacy fundraising platform requires multiple steps: duplicate the campaign, manually split the audience list, configure each version separately, wait for results, export data, analyze, and then re-send the winner to the remaining list. For a team already stretched thin across campaigns, events, and reporting, that workflow is the first thing cut when deadlines tighten.
The cost of not testing is invisible but real. Every untested send is a missed opportunity to learn something about your supporters. Over the course of a year, an organization sending two campaigns per week is making 100+ decisions about messaging without any feedback loop. That compounds: teams develop habits based on assumptions — "our donors prefer urgency," "long copy outperforms short" — that may or may not reflect reality, and they never find out.
The science behind effective A/B testing
A/B testing isn't just about picking a winner. Done well, it builds an institutional knowledge base about what moves your specific audience. The methodology matters, though, and getting it right doesn't require a statistics degree — just a few principles:
Test one variable at a time. If you change the subject line and the body copy and the image, you can't attribute the result to any single change. Isolate the variable you want to learn about. The most reliable tests are the simplest: same message, different subject line. Same subject line, different call-to-action button.
Understand sample size. A test with 50 recipients per variant is unlikely to produce a reliable result. The smaller your audience, the more dramatic the difference needs to be for the result to be meaningful. For most nonprofit broadcast sizes (1,000–10,000 recipients), Adaptive Testing automatically allocates a test group large enough to produce a statistically meaningful result before sending the winner to the rest.
Define your success metric before you send. Are you testing for opens, clicks, or conversions? The winner can be different depending on which metric you optimize for. A subject line that gets more opens might not produce more donations if the body copy doesn't deliver on the promise. Adaptive Testing lets you choose your optimization metric — click-through rate, conversion, or engagement — so the winner reflects what actually matters to your campaign.
Document what you learn. The value of a single test is the winning variant. The value of a testing program is the accumulated knowledge. Keep a running log of what you tested, what won, and by how much. Over time, patterns emerge that inform every future campaign — not from generic best practices, but from your own supporters' behavior.
What to test first
| If you want to learn… | Test this |
|---|---|
| What gets attention | Title, subject line, or opening line |
| What drives action | CTA wording |
| Whether urgency helps | Deadline-driven copy vs. softer copy |
| Whether the message needs context | Short copy vs. longer copy |
| Whether visuals help | Image vs. no image |
| Which emotional frame works | Impact, gratitude, urgency, or community |
Grounded in the tests momoGood customers run — and win with — most often.
Testing across channels: email and SMS
One of the advantages of testing inside momoGood is that the platform spans both email and SMS, which means you can apply what you learn in one channel to improve the other. For example:
- Subject line tests in email inform SMS openers. If you discover that urgency-framed subject lines outperform gratitude-framed ones in email, that insight likely applies to your SMS opening line too.
- CTA tests in SMS inform email buttons. SMS responses are fast and unambiguous — a link gets tapped or it doesn't. If "Give $25 now" outperforms "Support our mission" in text, that same CTA language is worth testing in your email campaigns.
- Tone tests reveal audience preferences. Some supporter bases respond to formal, institutional language. Others prefer conversational, first-person messaging. Testing reveals which camp your audience falls into, and that insight applies everywhere — not just the channel where you tested it.
Research from the MobileCause platform has shown that organizations using multi-channel testing programs see higher overall engagement than those testing in a single channel, because insights compound across every touchpoint.
Find out what your supporters actually respond to
Title, tone, urgency, visuals — Adaptive Testing tells you which version wins, from your own data, every time you send.
Book a demo →Common testing mistakes to avoid
Even teams that commit to testing can undermine their results with a few common mistakes:
- Testing too many things at once. An A/B test with a different subject line, different body copy, different image, and different CTA is not an A/B test — it's two entirely different messages. You'll have a winner, but you won't know why it won.
- Calling a winner too early. If 15 people opened Variant A and 12 opened Variant B in the first hour, that's not a result — it's noise. Adaptive Testing handles this automatically by waiting until the sample size is statistically meaningful before declaring a winner.
- Ignoring "negative" results. A test where both variants perform equally is not a failure — it tells you that the variable you tested doesn't matter much to your audience. That's valuable information. It means you can stop debating that element and focus your testing budget on variables that actually move the needle.
- Testing only during big campaigns. Year-end giving is the highest-stakes moment, which makes it the worst time to experiment. Run your tests on lower-stakes sends throughout the year so your year-end campaigns can deploy the proven winners.
Building a testing culture on your team
The organizations that get the most out of testing are the ones that make it a habit, not a special occasion. Here's what that looks like in practice:
Start with a question, not a hypothesis. Instead of "I think urgency works better," try "Does urgency work better for our mid-level donors?" The question-based framing keeps the team curious rather than attached to a preferred answer.
Share results publicly. When a test produces a clear winner, share it with the broader team — development, programs, communications. Testing insights often apply beyond the channel where they were discovered. A subject line that resonates in email might inspire a direct mail headline or a social post.
Set a cadence. Commit to testing at least one variable in every broadcast. When testing is the default rather than the exception, the learning compounds faster than any single test can deliver.
Every test crowns a winner
In a recent campaign, Variant A earned a 22% CTR while Variant B reached 35% CTR. Adaptive Testing identifies the winner — and sends it for you.
That 13-percentage-point difference, applied to a list of 10,000 supporters, means roughly 1,300 additional people clicking through to your donation page. Even at a modest conversion rate, that translates to dozens of additional gifts from a single send — simply because you tested two versions of the same message instead of guessing which one would work.
Run your first test today
It takes three steps: Draft your appeal in the composer. Add a variant — a title line is enough. Send — Adaptive Testing delivers the winner.
You don't need a testing strategy, a statistics background, or a dedicated analyst. You just need to send a message with two versions instead of one. The platform handles the rest — sample allocation, winner detection, and delivery. And every test you run teaches you something about your supporters that makes the next send better.
The goal is not to test everything. The goal is to make every send smarter than the last. — momoGood
Based on early adoption of momoGood Adaptive Testing in momoGood Messaging, measured two months after launch.