How getting visitors to actively align around stated principles impacts downstream donor conversion
Americans for Prosperity
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 08/08/2018 - 08/20/2018
Americans for Prosperity was running an Open Letter to the Senate for the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As part of the process, the visitors were asked to sign a statement of belief and were then presented with an opportunity to make a gift. With an email acquisition rate above 60%, our previous experiments had found it difficult to improve the email acquisition page.
However, the high motivation of visitors presented a new opportunity to potentially improve the downstream donor conversion. We had the hypothesis that if we had the visitors actively commit to each of the statements of the open letter instead of just signing their name, they would be better aligned to the values presented in the donation value proposition shown on the next screen which would increase their donor conversion.
Research Question
Will having visitors actively confirm the open letter statements improve downstream donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | shortened version | 0.08% | ||
| T1: | micro-yeses | 0.16% | 95.2% | 98.1% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 15,373 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 44,197, 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
× 95.2% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
By having donors actively agree with the various statements in the open letter, the donors were 95% more likely to make a gift on the next screen. We also monitored how this change impacted email acquisition and saw no significant difference to email acquisition rates. This would indicate that getting visitors to actively align around the principles of the open letter but them in a better mindset for donor conversion.
Given the significant increase to donor conversion and the decrease from the historical instant donor conversion rates (historically they were 0.3%), we will rerun this experiment to further validate these learnings.