How a monthly-first tabbed donation form affected monthly gift conversion
CaringBridge
CaringBridge offers free personal, protected websites for people to easily share updates and receive support and encouragement from their community during a health journey. Every 7 minutes, a CaringBridge website is created for someone experiencing a health event.
Experiment Summary
Ended On: 03/16/2023
CaringBridge’s main donation page received a steady but low volume of donations. They wanted to test ideas that would convert more of these gifts, which were mostly episodic gifts, into monthly recurring gifts. The monthly selection was below the donation amount selection, and they hypothesized that they needed to move the “one-time or monthly” selection above the gift amount. They also decided to make the donation form monthly by default, so that the user would select to move to a one-time gift. They launched a test of these two changes to determine a winner.
Research Question
We believe that moving the one-time recurring decision above the donation amount decision and pre-selecting the recurring option for main donation page visitors will achieve an increase in conversion rate.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.09% | ||
| T1: | Treatment #1 | 0.41% | 339.3% | 99.9% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 1,898 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 10,489, 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
× 339.3% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The key learning from this experiment was that moving the one-time recurring decision above the donation amount decision and pre-selecting the recurring option for main donation page visitors led to a significant increase in donation conversion rate. The treatment group saw a 339.3% increase in donations compared to the control group. This was statistically significant with a confidence level of 99.9%.
These results suggest that making it easier for donors to choose a recurring donation option and pre-selecting it by default can lead to higher conversion rates.
In analyzing this experiment, the team wondered if the word “recurring” was more confusing than “monthly”, and set up a test to better understand the difference in nomenclature.