Focus on the Family

How creating a security-themed visual enhancement to a secure donation form affects donor conversions

Experiment ID: #94725

Focus on the Family

Focus on the Family is a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God's design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 05/20/2022 - 06/18/2022

Focus on the Family uses a donation platform that has a fairly standard contact and payment form. The current platform provider uses a form that asks for name and credit card info and is also located on a secure server, but we felt like the form could use some visual enhancement around security features. While the native form was indeed secure, we felt like creating some visual call-outs around the area where you enter your credit card info might actually lead to more completed transactions and thus, more donations. The treatment for this experiment placed a grey box around the credit card info along with a secure lock icon. The control remained the standard layout of a white box with no lock icon. We ran this test on a single content offer that was being promoted on Facebook, so that we could have enough traffic to potentially validate the results.

Research Question

We believe that adding a visual treatment to the donation form that appears more secure for potential donors entering their credit card info will achieve a greater completion rate and a higher number of donations.

Design

C: Control
T1: with Security Box

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidenceAverage Gift
C: Control 2.6%$0.00
T1: with Security Box 5.9%125.8% 97.9%$0.00

This experiment has a required sample size of 292 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 786, 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
× 125.8% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

As hypothesized, the treatment with greater perceived security did create a sizeable lift in transaction completitions and total donations. We saw a massive 126% lift in total donations with a 97.8% level of confidence. The perceived increase in security had the effect we were looking for – an increase in form completions and a greater number of donations, but it also was an experiment that had very little potential downside. With this big of a lift, we felt the improvements were drastic enough to roll out the treatment as a standardization across all 1500+ donation forms on Focus on the Family. We started by creating a personalization through Google Optimize that would apply the treatment to all donation forms. Once we saw that the treatment did not have any adverse effects for other known offers with donation forms, we worked with the team at Anedot (the donation platform provider) to open up the source code to allow us to hard code this as a standardized feature for all forms. This has now been implemented as the control going forward. This is a continuation of multiple tactical tests that we completed to improve the performance of a standard donation form for Focus on the Family. Future variants of this test could be testing if background color variations improve conversions or if additional callout text increases form fill completion rates.


Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #94725

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