CaringBridge

How impact language affects donor conversion rate

Experiment ID: #2611

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: 04/01/2016 - 04/15/2016

Previous CaringBridge experiments had shown that more people donated when personalization was introduced. However, these tests had been run on “tribute” pages, where the gift is closely tied to a personal relationship. CaringBridge also had a “non-tribute” donation page, which is what someone would access if they went to the main site and clicked “donate”.

The team wanted to test the effect of impact language on these pages to see if more visitors made donations when the headline connected with the impact, rather than the organization. 

Research Question

Will impact language increase conversion on the non-tribute donation page?

Design

C: Organization
T1: Impact

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Organization 9.3%
T1: Impact 3.8%-59.5% 95.7%

This experiment has a required sample size of 153 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 320, 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
× 59.5% decrease in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The results were fascinating, as they began to create separation between the motivation to give for tribute and non-tribute visitors. In this case, the impact language decreased conversion (even though the opposite had proven true in the tribute funnel). That tells us that having “CaringBridge” in the headline is important orientation for visitors to the non-tribute page. It suggests a new round of tests that are more organizational-centric for this donation page.


Experiment Documented by Jeff Giddens
Jeff Giddens is President of NextAfter.

Question about experiment #2611

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