How shifting the value proposition to sponsors rather than children affects donations
Compassion International
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 05/20/2020 - 06/01/2020
Compassion International had traditionally focused all of their efforts on children as the object and recipient of donations. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, they launched a fundraising effort to help sponsors who were affected financially continue their sponsorship so they wouldn’t lose their child. Naturally, they placed the child as the key recipient of this fundraising effort, with the headline “Help a child keep their sponsor!”. However, the team wondered if this focus was misplaced. Since the appeal was to sponsors, they wondered if focusing on sponsors as the recipient would increase donations. Their hypothesis was that sponsors are more likely to empathize with fellow sponsors (and the child as a secondary element), rather than the child-first, sponsor second.
They simply swapped the words child and sponsor in the headline, and launched an experiment to determine a winner.
Research Question
How will focusing on sponsors rather than children affect donations?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 7.0% | ||
| T1: | Treatment #1 | 15.4% | 119.2% | 97.8% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 110 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 291, 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
× 119.2% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment, which put the sponsor first, more than doubled donations. This indicated that the appeal of helping a sponsor, in this case, might outweigh the benefit to the child, and lended credence to the hypothesis that sponsors might empathize with fellow sponsors more than the immediate needs of a child. More testing is needed on this page to continue to increase results.