How presenting the donation page as the homepage during a year-end campaign can impact donor conversion
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: 12/30/2019 - 12/31/2019
Focus on the Family wanted to test into a new, more radical way, to increase donor conversion during the final days of their year-end campaign. They hypothesized that presenting the donation page itself as/on the homepage might help achieve their goals. To do this, they put a redirect in place for 50% of their traffic on the last two days of the year that showed their year-end donation page instead of their normal homepage. The redirect would only show on a person’s first visit, it would include a search bar at the top of the page to allow people to still be able to search the Focus site, and even presented an exit-intent pop-up that linked to the most trafficked pages within their site in case people were looking for something in particular – outside of making a gift.
Research Question
Will a donation page redirect on an organization’s homepage – during the highest point of conversion during a year-end campaign – increase donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 17.9% | ||
| T1: | Homepage Redirect | 22.3% | 24.5% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 641 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 11,349, 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
× 24.5% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The homepage redirect to the year-end donation page increased donor conversion by 24.5% during the last two days of the year! We saw these similar results when we looked at device type as well. There was a 23% increase on desktop devices and a directional 18% increase in donor conversion on mobile. This experiment resulted in an incremental $20k when you exclude all gifts greater than or equal to $1k and an incremental 200 donors.
By presenting the donation page and form to people right when they got to the page, we were able to convert more people who weren’t originally planning on making a gift, to make one; and decreased friction to the giving process for people who had intentions to make a gift on the site.
Going into this experiment, we did some analysis on the Focus homepage and traffic to their homepage during December 30-31 to know the potential risk and motivations of website visitors during those days. This helped us to eliminate as much risk as possible and develop the donation page that we redirected to address any potential concerns.