How communal language affects donor conversion rate during a matching gift campaign
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: 12/16/2020 - 12/20/2020
CaringBridge was running a matching gift campaign for two days as part of their holiday appeal. They had previously tested a sticky bar during a previous match that employed “communal” language (as opposed to transactional language) that increased both clickthrough rate and conversion rate during the match. They wanted to extend that language to their tribute donation pages, where people can give in honor of a specific journal author.
The original page positioned CaringBridge as the hero—it helped the author stay connected to family and friends. Then, it positioned the reader as the one who makes that happen. Instead, they decided to double down on language that addressed the prospective donor as the hero, removing CaringBridge entirely. First, they changed the headline to thank the donor for directly helping the author stay connected to their loved ones. Then, they reinforced that (and introduced CaringBridge) by adding exclusivity to the subheadline.
Finally, they applied the communal language theory to the call-to-action that mentioned the match. The original CTA offered a “dollar for dollar” match if the donor gave—which appeared to be transactional language. It also brought the brand “CaringBridge” back into the conversation. They removed the brand name from the CTA and provided a “pressure release valve” that put the power of whether to participate or not into the hands of the donor. Finally, they removed the “dollar for dollar” language and launched a test to see if their hypothesis was proven correct.
Research Question
We believe that employing communal language for tribute donation page visitors will achieve an increase in donor conversion rate.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 73.4% | ||
| T1: | Communal Copy | 81.8% | 11.5% | 94.7% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 189 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 364, and the level of confidence is not above 95% the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
The treatment with the communal language did not appear to have a significant impact overall. However, when the team dug into the device types, they found that desktop visitors—which made up the majority of donations—showed a 20.2% increase in conversion rate. On top of this increase in conversion rate, desktop visitors showed a 29.6% increase in revenue with a 98% level of confidence. Not only did more people give—they gave larger amounts!
This showed the potential impact of replacing transactional language with communal language. Next, the CaringBridge team wanted to re-test this language in a non-match scenario to see if it would have year-round impact.