How communal language affects donor conversion through a tribute widget
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: 07/06/2021 - 07/23/2021
CaringBridge had successfully tested communal language as part of their fundraising process for appeal campaigns and in the recurring donation funnel. However, they had not tested it with their tribute widget.
They developed tribute widget copy that first thanked the reader for being a good friend to the author or patient, and then presented the opportunity to give to support their site.
Secondarily, they wanted to understand the impact of introducing the “to CaringBridge” variant on the tribute widget, so they launched a second treatment with the control and this additional language.
Research Question
We believe that adding communal language for personal home page visitors will achieve an increase in conversion.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.31% | |||
| T1: | Communal Language | 0.28% | -11.0% | 98.2% | |
| T2: | Control (plus "to CaringBridge") | 0.30% | -2.9% | 45.6% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 291,326 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 843,014, 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
× 11.0% decrease in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment with the communal language produced a slightly higher average gift, but an 11% decrease in conversion rate. Upon review, the team noticed that there might have been a missing element in the communal language—the direct ask. The control had a sentence that asked the donor to give, and that was missing in the treatment.
This experiment should be re-run with the direct ask controlled.
Secondarily, the addition of “to CaringBridge” language seemed to have no impact.