Luther Seminary

How Interrupting the Browsing Experience with a Gift Selection Slide-up Impacts Online Donations

Experiment ID: #202889

Luther Seminary

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 03/19/2025 - 03/20/2026

Luther Seminary operates several high-traffic digital properties, with Enter the Bible receiving approximately 450,000 visitors within 30 days—which is more than its other platforms. Given this scale, the team identified Enter the Bible as the most viable environment to test new on-site fundraising tactics that could generate meaningful learning and results.

Historically, the site has relied on relatively passive donation opportunities, which do not actively interrupt or redirect user attention. This raises an important question: are visitors motivated to give when presented with a more prominent and immediate fundraising prompt, or does this type of interruption create friction that reduces engagement?

To explore this, the team is testing the impact of a more attention-grabbing on-site element: a gift selection slide-up. This element appears during the browsing experience and is designed to actively divert user attention toward making a donation.

The experiment includes two variations:

Control: The existing website experience with no additional fundraising interruption
Treatment: A site-wide slide-up featuring three predefined donation amounts and an additional “other” option

This test is being run across general website visitors to Enter the Bible, leveraging the platform’s high traffic volume to reach a large and diverse audience.

The goal of this experiment is to better understand donor motivation in a passive content environment. Specifically, whether introducing a more assertive, attention-directing prompt increases donation activity, or whether it disrupts the user experience in a way that suppresses giving.

Research Question

We believe that introducing a gift selection slide-up for website visitors on Enter the Bible will achieve an increase in donation conversions because interrupting passive browsing with a clear and immediate giving opportunity reduces friction and prompts action through attention capture and choice simplification.

Design

C: Control

T1: Treatment #1

Results

	Treatment Name	Conv. Rate	Relative Difference	Confidence
C:	Control	0.00%
T1:	Treatment #1	0.03%	100.0%	99.5%

This experiment has a required sample size of 11,954 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 50,055, 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
× 100.0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

This test demonstrates that a more interruptive, attention-grabbing donation prompt can drive incremental giving on a high-traffic content site. The gift selection slide-up (treatment) generated 8 donations totaling $347.80, with an average gift of $43.48, while the control generated no recorded donations. This suggests that proactively prompting users can convert a small portion of otherwise passive visitors into donors. While VWO reported a +0.03% lift with 99.5% confidence, the results required additional validation. Because users were redirected from the Enter the Bible domain to a Luther Seminary donation page without cross-domain tracking enabled, conversions were not fully captured within the testing platform. To account for this, a backup campaign tracking setup within the donation system was used to verify results. Although originally implemented to keep the test clean, this approach ultimately ensured accurate attribution and confirmed that all donations came from the treatment experience. From a behavioral perspective, the results suggest that capturing attention and simplifying the giving decision through preset gift options can prompt action, even when initial donor intent is low. However, the low overall conversion rate indicates that attention alone is not enough—stronger motivational framing will likely be required to drive meaningful scale. Next Steps

Keep the Donation Experience Within a Single Domain: Future tests will prioritize directing users to donation pages within the Enter the Bible environment. Keeping the full journey within a single, first-party domain will improve tracking accuracy, reduce attribution gaps, and enable more confident decision-making.
Test Alternative On-Site Donation Prompts: Build on this learning by testing additional formats, such as a sticky donation slide-out, to understand how different levels of persistence and visibility impact conversion.
Strengthen Motivational Framing: Pair attention-grabbing elements with messaging that emphasizes urgency, impact, or donor identity to increase both conversion rate and overall revenue.

Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #202889

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