How adding a tab for recurring tribute giving affects donor 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
Timeframe: 06/02/2023 - 06/19/2023
Most of CaringBridge’s revenue came through their tribute donation page, which was driven by traffic to their journals. Because of the episodic nature of CaringBridge usage, donor retention was low — except for recurring donors. Since monthly recurring donors give smaller amounts regularly, they stick around a lot longer.
CaringBridge wanted to test including recurring giving on their donation page to see if it affected overall giving. They decided to allow it for 20% of traffic to mitigate any risk of decreasing overall giving. They did this via a “tabbed” form that gave the user a new “first choice” between a one-time and a recurring gift.
Research Question
We believe that adding a tab for a recurring donation for tribute donation page visitors will achieve an increase in recurring gifts with no decrease in overall donor conversion.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | No Monthly Option | 0.00% | $55.64 | ||
| T1: | Tabbed - One Time Preselected | 0.20% | 100.0% | 99.5% | $56.74 |
This experiment has a required sample size of 763 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 19,947, 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
× 100.0% increase in conversion rate
× 2.0% increase in average gift
104.0% increase in revenue
Key Learnings
Ultimately, the treatment produced no statistically significant change in giving, while producing 8 recurring gifts from a very small slice of the traffic. It is interesting that the treatment drove a directional 3.7% lift in overall giving, which might suggest that the tab decision (which is a “smaller decision” than the gift array, increased overall engagement with the donation form.
This shows CaringBridge that they can safely include a recurring option without affecting overall giving, and produce valuable recurring donors from this funnel.