NextAfter

Can Highlighting the Monthly Impact Boost Recurring Giving?

Experiment ID: #200687

NextAfter

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 09/26/2025 - 10/26/2025

The organization’s main donation page serves both committed donors and new visitors, playing a central role in overall giving. Unlike acquisition-focused pages meant to convert new audiences, this page often attracts high-value donors and returning supporters. As such, it presents a high-opportunity but high-risk space for testing.

In previous tests on acquisition donation pages, the organization found that adding a monthly gift callout that highlights the recurring impact and donor benefits increased the number of donors who chose to give monthly. Those tests indicated that, with the right framing, some page visitors can be persuaded to commit to becoming long-term donors.

This experiment asked whether that insight would transfer to the main donation page (without cannibalizing revenue from larger one-time gifts). Would prompting donors to “consider a monthly gift” increase monthly conversions? Or would it cause high-capacity donors to downshift from large one-time gifts to smaller recurring ones?

The Control used the standard donation page layout, which defaults to a one-time gift and includes no additional prompts about monthly giving.

The Treatment introduced a soft callout above the form that read: “Would you consider a monthly donation? Your monthly gift of $15 ensures families in spiritual crisis can find trusted help the moment they need it—and receive biblical support year-round. Plus, you’ll get to choose a new free resource every month for your family.”

No other changes were made to the page layout or the form’s functionality. We randomly split traffic 50/50 between both versions and ran this test for 1 month.

Research Question

We believe that adding a monthly giving callout above the donation form on the main donation page will increase monthly donor conversions, as framing monthly giving as impactful and rewarding will motivate recurring support without displacing larger one-time donations. Framing monthly giving as impactful and rewarding will motivate recurring support without displacing larger one-time donations.

Design

C: Control

T1: Treatment #1

Results

	Treatment Name	Conv. Rate	Relative Difference	Confidence
C:	Control	0.94%
T1:	Treatment #1	2.1%	125.2%	99.3%

This experiment has a required sample size of 827 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,141, 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
× 125.2% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

This test demonstrated that a soft monthly giving prompt above the donation form can significantly increase recurring donor conversions—without suppressing large gifts and with potential upside for smaller one-time donations.

The Treatment produced a 125% increase in monthly donor conversions (2.1% vs. 0.9%), with a statistically significant 99.3% level of confidence.
Recurring donor volume more than doubled (33 vs. 15), while the average monthly gift remained steady ($30 on Treatment vs. $31 on Control, after removing an outlier)
While the Treatment had fewer gifts over $1,000 (35 vs. 41), this difference was not statistically significant (44% level of confidence), indicating no reliable evidence that large one-time gifts were cannibalized.

When isolating smaller one-time gifts (under $1,000):

The Treatment saw a 9.5% lift in volume, with an 86.4% level of confidence -- this is a strong directional signal, though not statistically conclusive
The average gift amount also increased, from $132 on the Control to $140 on the Treatment

These results suggest that a well-placed, low-friction callout can meaningfully increase monthly donor conversion, and may even have a positive reinforcing effect on smaller one-time giving. Next Steps for Testing:

Explore alternate monthly ask amounts (e.g., $20, $25, or $30) to assess the revenue impact of shifting the default suggested amount.
Refine the callout language or visual design to test whether urgency, impact framing, or reward emphasis further improves performance.
Test this approach on other key donation pathways (e.g., campaign pages, seasonal asks) to evaluate if the effect carries over beyond the main donation page.

Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #200687

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.