Hillsdale College

How adding incentive and removing donation form friction affects conversion

Experiment ID: #1317

Hillsdale College

Founded in 1844, Hillsdale College is an independent liberal arts college with a student body of about 1,400. Hillsdale’s educational mission rests upon two principles: academic excellence and institutional independence. The College does not accept federal or state taxpayer subsidies for any of its operations.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 04/27/2015 - 05/27/2015

On Hillsdale College’s main donation form, we had done previous experiments to lift conversion rate 22% by modifying the format of the donation form and adding messaging around what we believed is both unique and appealing about Hillsdale College to potential donors. In an effort to continue optimizing this high traffic page, we shifted our focus to reducing friction and adding incentive to the gift.

We reduced friction by adding a lower starting donation amount to the gift array with the belief that a larger ask may make the donors feel a smaller gift would not be as impactful.  We also removed dividers between each section of the form to help move visitors down the page.  For incentive, we added the existing offer to receive a brick in the College’s Liberty Walk for a gift of $500 or more.

Research Question

Does a lower initial donation ask in the gift array and added incentive improve the overall visitor conversion and revenue of the main donation page?

Design

C: Form with section dividers
T1: Form with incentive and no dividers

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidenceAverage Gift
C: Form with section dividers 26.9%$70.78
T1: Form with incentive and no dividers 35.6%32.5% 96.1%$80.55

This experiment has a required sample size of 216 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 478, 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
× 32.5% increase in conversion rate
× 13.8% increase in average gift
50.8% increase in revenue

Key Learnings

The new donation form treatment was able to produce a 32.5% increase in conversion and a lift to average gift of 13.8%. We noticed was that, despite adding the incentive for a $500+ gift, we didn’t see any donors give at or above that level so the incentive did not seem to have much impact on the average gift.

Our initial concern was that adding the $25 option to the gift array would lower the average gift enough to negate any increases in conversion. This proved to be false.  The lower gift was able to increase the conversion rate and it did not seem to make donors give less.


Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #1317

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