Have you ever taken an online quiz to match your makeup colors, or to discover which flavor of coffee is best for you? It’s no surprise that when surveyed, most professional marketers say they work interactive content opportunities into their overall marketing strategies. Interactive content requires the audience to participate, as opposed to passively reading, listening or watching. In the nonprofit sector, we often see this take the form of polls, surveys, and quizzes. These activities offer potential supporters and donors a richer experience than one they could have watching a video or scrolling text.
We have lots of examples from the consumer world showing that customer surveys boost retention. When you allow your audience to give and receive feedback, you enhance their experience and give them the opportunity to highlight the things they care most about. All of this is valuable data for you as a marketer! When we look at the reasons that marketers use interactive content, conversion and lead generation are top of mind; two reasons that connect directly to a nonprofit’s fundraising goals.
However, a third reason stands out: Educating the audience. Your supporters crave directing their own learning experiences! When you allow people to participate in knowledge-seeking, the result is higher engagement with your messaging. Your potential donors respond well when they don’t feel they’re being sold something. They want to make choices that serve their needs and are spurred by curiosity. That’s also what we want as nonprofit marketers; we want buy-in from mission-aligned supporters. They’re on the journey with us to make change in the world.
At Care2, we have an online community of about 60 million members who want to take action for good causes and largely do that through signing and creating petitions. We wanted to figure out how we could use interactive content to improve action-taking, so we built a platform called Care2 Cultivate that serves activities like quizzes and polls to people who visit Care2. com. We didn’t want to target anyone randomly who may or may not have an affinity to the content. Instead, Cultivate targets everyone on a specific charity’s list.
If anyone in that charity’s database visited Care2.com, they were eligible to engage with a branded activity for that organization. After completing the engagement, they could be taken to a website link on the charity’s site or a donation opportunity. As we started building this out for nonprofit clients we had millions of engagements and very quickly learned a lot about the content that performs best.
One thing that surprised us was that the more challenging the question, the less engagement we got. We found people are uncomfortable engaging with something when they don’t know the answer or don’t feel aligned with its sentiment. The easy quizzes that we thought were less serious were outperforming ones that we thought were more important. Confronting people with information they don’t already have buy-in for was less effective in converting to action. And, as we continued to test, we found quizzes with “wrong” answers were lowering conversion. People don’t like seeing their errors pointed out!
So, our team flipped the content around. Instead of asking the donor prospect if they know some facts, we told them a fact and asked them how they feel about it. These feedback or affirmation pieces were most popular with donors. For one animal welfare client “Do you think?” polls asking prospects to agree with positive statements about animals were rated the most effective.
Clicks were just one metric we monitored. By tracking which prospects engaged with Cultivate activities, our clients were able to measure fundraising ROI over a year and saw a significant boost in donations from individuals who interacted with content on Care2.com. A fantastic bonus was an increase in re-activation from lapsed list members after interacting with Cultivate quizzes and polls. I shared a full case study with data from our client SPCAI at AFP ICON 2026 in the session, “How to Use Interactive Content to Boost Online Donations”.
Building greater engagement with your online community doesn’t happen by accident! It requires intentionally retargeting your existing supporters, leaning into interactive content, and crafting messages that validate what your audience already feels. Content that resonates with your audience’s core convictions helps your organization cultivate highly engaged supporters who truly care about your mission.
This article was originally published in Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association – Spring Newsletter 2026
