In 1950, the U.S. Air Force had a problem.
Planes that should have been safer were crashing more often. Good pilots were making mistakes. And nobody could quite figure out why.
So the Air Force did what any rational, data-driven organization would do: they studied the numbers.
It turns out that back in the ’20s, when designing the cockpits, the Air Force had standardized them based on the average pilot at the time. Average arm length. Average torso size. Average leg length. The idea had been simple: build the cockpit for the “average pilot.”
It had sounded smart, yet it was a disaster.
Eventually, a young analyst named Lt. Gilbert Daniels looked deeper into the data and found the real problem: the “average pilot” didn’t actually exist. When he compared pilots against the average measurements, not a single pilot matched across all dimensions.
The Air Force had accidentally designed a cockpit that fit nobody.
And honestly? We as fundraisers do this all the time.
Recently, our team ran a conversion rate optimization (CRO) test that surprised us.
It was a test we’ve seen win repeatedly: reversing the order of donation amounts on a landing page from ascending to descending and adding a “Most Popular” callout.
Normally, it performs well, but this time it lost.
That alone wasn’t shocking. CRO tests are contextual. What works for one nonprofit can absolutely fail for another. But this one felt off.
So we pulled apart the donation form. And there it was: a $75 suggested gift amount.
Now, I almost never see $75 used as a default ask. It’s awkward psychologically. It’s not a natural giving amount. It doesn’t feel as intuitive as $50 or $100 does.
So I asked why it was there. The answer: because it was the average online gift.
And that’s where the problem started, with a flawed assumption. Because averages are often terrible at describing actual human behavior.
The average gift on the file was roughly $75 because donors clustered around two common amounts: $50 and $100. The midpoint between those two numbers mathematically creates an average of $75. But donors were not actually choosing $75.
In fact, when we ranked gift frequency, $75 was only the 11th most commonly given amount on that organization’s donation form. And across 600,000 online donations from more than 35 nonprofit organizations over the past year, $75 ranked 16th overall.
The “average donor” had quietly distorted the donation experience, causing it to underperform. Just like the Air Force cockpit.
This is one of the biggest traps in fundraising analytics. We confuse averages with behavior. If one donor gives $25 and another gives $125, the average is $75. But nobody actually gave $75.
And when you build your donation experience around the mean rather than actual donor behavior (the mode), you create unnecessary friction.
That matters because the most commonly chosen gift amount likely represents something important: the amount with the least psychological resistance. The easiest “yes.”
That’s why mode—the most frequently occurring value—often matters more than mean when designing donation forms.
The mode reflects behavior. The mean reflects math. And those are not the same thing.
This is also why benchmarking and donor analytics need nuance.
Two organizations can both have a $75 average gift and also have completely different donor realities underneath:
- One may be driven by a large number of $50 donors.
- Another may be polarized between $25 and $250.
- Another may have recurring donors clustering at $30 and major donors inflating the average upward.
The average alone tells you almost nothing about donor behavior.
It’s the equivalent of designing a cockpit for a pilot that does not exist.
The lesson from the Air Force story was not “ignore data.” It was the opposite.
Look deeper into the data.
Daniels did not reject analytics. He challenged a lazy interpretation of analytics. And that distinction matters.
Because nonprofits today have more donor data than ever before. But more data does not automatically create more understanding. Sometimes it simply creates more sophisticated averages.
And donors are not averages.
So if you’re evaluating your donation forms, ask:
“What gift amounts do donors naturally choose most often?”
Because the goal is not to force donors toward the average.
The goal is to reduce friction, reinforce behavior, and create the easiest possible path to saying “yes.”
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