How defaulting to a recurring gift on an acquisition donation page, Living with Contagious Joy, impacts recurring donor conversion
Experiment ID: #196574
NextAfter
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 03/25/2025 - 04/10/2025
Focus on the Family is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing guidance and resources to support families. To increase recurring donations, we tested defaulting to a recurring gift option on the donation page for the high-traffic “Living with Contagious Joy” acquisition funnel, an ideal setting to measure the impact of this default on donor conversion.
We hypothesized that defaulting to a recurring gift option and emphasizing the impact of monthly donations would increase the number of donors choosing recurring contributions, ultimately boosting donor retention and long-term support for Focus on the Family’s mission.
For this iteration, we configured a VWO Split URL test with a new control and a treatment page, each receiving 50% of traffic. This setup ensured users blocking VWO redirects were excluded, preventing data distortion in the control group and yielding more accurate results.
Research Question
We believe that defaulting to a recurring gift and emphasizing its broader impact for Focus on the Family donors will increase the number of recurring donations because it presents a manageable commitment and highlights the significance of ongoing support, encouraging more donors to commit to long-term giving.
Design
C: Control: Default to One-time
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Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control: Default to One-time | 0.20% | ||
| T1: | Treatment: Default to Recurring | 0.81% | 313.8% | 98.2% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 1,004 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,001, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.
Flux Metrics Affected
The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:
0% increase in traffic
× 313.8% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
This experiment ran for 17 days and tested the impact of defaulting to a recurring gift option on the donation page within Focus on the Family’s “Living with Contagious Joy” acquisition funnel.
While the treatment successfully increased recurring transactions by 313.8% with a 98.2% level of confidence, it also led to a 45.2% decrease in one-time donations, resulting in an overall 33% drop in total transactions. This indicates that although more donors opted for monthly giving when it was pre-selected, the change significantly discouraged one-time donations.
Given these results, the test highlights a valuable trade-off: optimizing for recurring giving can improve long-term donor value, but may reduce total donor acquisition in the short term. Future testing could explore ways to elevate the visibility and value of monthly giving —such as using stronger messaging, layout hierarchy, or design emphasis. Additionally, tracking the retention and lifetime value of these newly acquired monthly donors will be critical to understanding if the short-term loss in total transactions is outweighed by long-term donor value.