Your team spends two weeks perfecting a campaign, hits send to 50,000 supporters, and discovers three days later it underperformed by 18%. That's time and budget you can't recover.
Most nonprofits test the wrong way at the wrong time. They play it safe when they should take risks, and take risks when they should already know the answer.
The what
Most nonprofits use A/B testing for campaigns. Create two versions, send both, see which wins. The problem? By the time you learn what works, you've wasted half your budget on what doesn't. Only 26% invest in pre-market testing, which tells you what resonates before you spend a dime on your full audience.
The gap between these approaches isn't philosophical. It's financial.
The why
Think about what A/B testing actually tells you. It confirms that Message A performed 3% better than Message B with the audience you already reached. What it doesn't tell you is whether a completely different approach might have performed 30% better. Or whether your "winning" message actively turned off a segment of supporters you didn't even realize you were losing.
Pre-market testing flips this equation. Instead of learning from mistakes made in real time with real donors, you learn before anyone sees your campaign.
Should you care?
Absolutely.
Pre-market testing may feel riskier than launching blind. It requires upfront investment, takes time, and means admitting you don't already know what will work. But the actual risk is in the approach most nonprofits default to: spending your entire budget to learn lessons you could have discovered for a fraction of the cost.
Safe isn't sending untested campaigns to your full list and hoping for the best. Safe is knowing what will resonate before you ask people for money. The organizations seeing transformational results aren't the ones avoiding risk. They're the ones who've figured out where risk actually lives, and they've moved it upstream where it costs less and teaches more.