The Navigators

How a recurring interrupter with a dynamic ask impacts recurring donor conversion metrics

Experiment ID: #179555

The Navigators

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 05/21/2024 - 07/16/2024

In an effort to increase recurring donors for The Navigators, we originally ran a recurring interrupter on their main donation page. The interrupter only showed for individuals who initiated a one-time project gift under $100. The interrupter then asked the individual to upgrade their giving to a $10 monthly gift. Our hypothesis was that asking for a gift smaller than what was originally initiated would lead to an increase in recurring giving.

This experiment saw a 7.8% lift in recurring donations with a 35% level of confidence. Additionally, we tracked the amount of “yes” clicks on the donation interrupter and found that 4.98% of people who originally initiated a one-time gift of $100 or less converted their gift to a $10 recurring gift.

In this new experiment, we wanted to test adding a dynamic ask amount to the interrupter to capture more donors who were giving gifts larger than $100. The dynamic interrupter ran as follows:

$100>: $10 ask

$100-$199: $15 ask

$200-$299: $30 ask

$300-$399: $40 ask

$400-$500: $50 recurring ask

Research Question

We believe that asking for a smaller, recurring donation for one-time project givers will achieve an increase in recurring giving because it reduces the perceived financial burden, making it easier for donors to commit regularly.

Design

C: Control

T1: Donation Interrupter with Dynamic Ask

Results

	Treatment Name	Conv. Rate	Relative Difference	Confidence	Average Gift
C:	Control	3.2%			$153.33
T1:	Donation Interrupter with Dynamic Ask	3.1%	-2.5%	15.6%	$164.21

This experiment has a required sample size of 362,132 in order to be valid. Unfortunately, the required sample size was not met and a level of confidence above 95% was not met so the experiment results are not valid.

Key Learnings

The key learnings from this experiment are that the addition of a dynamic ask amount to the interrupter did not achieve an increase in recurring giving as hypothesized. In fact, there was a 2.5% decrease in Recurring Donation for All Traffic with a low statistical level of confidence of 15.6%. This means that the control group actually performed better in terms of recurring donations.

Despite the decrease in recurring donations, we saw that 3.47% of people converted their one-time gift to a monthly gift based on the number of "yes" clicks on the pop-up.

Although this conversion rate it lower than what we saw in the first experiment, it is to be expected. We hypothesize that the conversion rate is the same as experiment 1 for donors who initiated a gift lower than $100, but expect the conversion rate to be a lot lower for people who initiated a gift larger than $100.

We believe this is because people who were making a gift larger than $100 had the intention to give a significant one-time contribution rather than committing to a smaller recurring donation. This suggests that while the dynamic ask amount may not have been effective in increasing overall recurring donations, it did still manage to convert a notable percentage of one-time donors to monthly contributors, particularly among those giving smaller amounts.

Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #179555

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