How showing the effect of a gift on a child’s future and emotional health will impact sponsorship conversion
Prison Fellowship International
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 03/08/2021 - 04/09/2021
PFI updated their website and the full layout of their sponsorship pages. While driving higher traffic to these pages, we wanted to take advantage of that traffic to test the sliding doors theory—showing what is reality now versus what reality could be with the sponsors gift. Another key component to this theory is ensuring that the donor feels the impact of the loss on the child’s life and similarly feels the transformation emotionally that their gift will create for this child. We tested this for over a month on their child specific page, the decision point where the audience decides if they will sponsor this particular child or not.
Research Question
That showing what the child’s life is and what life will be after the donors gifts, with all the emotions and impact of that gift, will increase child sponsorships.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 5.0% | $0.00 | ||
| T1: | Child Specific Sponsorship | 4.1% | -18.3% | 72.1% | $0.00 |
This experiment has a required sample size of 3,964 in order to be valid. Unfortunately, the required sample size was not met and a level of confidence above 95% was not met so the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
Despite the increased traffic to these pages, there was no discernible difference in sponsorship. A 52% level of confidence is a veritable coin flip either way.
Our hypothesis is that copy alone is not enough to impact conversion one way or the other. Our next step is to test tactical page design test to keep folks on the child sponsorship page and make this the complete decision point. With the current design, users are presented the option to leave the page at several different points. In fact, twenty percent of the gifts that were made on the control were people who left this page to give a donation to the main PFI donation page.
Revenue did experience a 27.9% decrease with a 93% level of confidence. This is because more people were likely to give a one-time gift on the control.