How clarifying the intended action and donation amount affects sponsor conversion rate
Prison Fellowship International
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 12/14/2021 - 01/11/2022
Prison Fellowship International had been running heavy acquisition for online sponsorship acquisition for more than a year. At the top of the page, people were introduced to a child and given the chance to sponsor them. When they clicked the “sponsor now” button, they were taken to a re-skinned RaiseDonors form at the bottom.
The team noticed upon examination that once you reached the bottom of the page, the form didn’t look like a traditional donation form. First, there was no price or array. This was because sponsorship only has one price ($39/month). So the team set up a treatment that installed a single button, preselected, for $39/month to reinforce the ask amount.
There was one more missing link between the top and the bottom of the page: the intended action was not repeated. Even though they clicked “sponsor now” to get down there, it was disorienting to have no ask amount and no CTA. They added the language “Sponsor [ChildName] Now”. Once they did that, they added another tab to the form that gave the donor an out from the $39/monthly gift—”give a one-time gift”. This defaulted to an array which could possibly attract additional revenue from people who were not ready to commit to a sponsorship.
Research Question
We believe that reinforcing the ask amount and call to action for people who click the main CTA will achieve an increase in completed sponsorships.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.92% | $0.00 | ||
| T1: | Tabbed forms | 2.1% | 126.5% | 99.4% | $0.00 |
This experiment has a required sample size of 843 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,279, 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
× 126.5% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The changes to the donation form produced a 126.5% increase in conversion. This revealed that there was confusion and disorientation in the mind of the donor once they got to the bottom of the page. The added language and reinforced CTA and price point helped more people finish the process. In fact, some amount of this conversion increase was just because it was visually clear that it was a donation form.
Surprisingly, during the test period, the extra tab did not generate any additional gifts, although since the treatment was rolled out, it has generated several hundred dollars in revenue.