CaringBridge

How specifically focusing on non-donors affects donor conversion rate

Experiment ID: #99124

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

Ended On: 06/29/2022

CaringBridge was running an appeal celebrating their 25th anniversary. Earlier in the campaign, they had tested the concept of asking donors who had given for three consecutive years to avoid “breaking the streak”, with much success. In their final campaign email, they wanted to test whether specifically messaging to non-donors with language that acknowledged that they hadn’t given before would inspire them to give.

Their control email was a “last-day”, urgency-focused message. They added a single line of copy: “my notes show you’ve never supported CaringBridge before”. They used this careful language intentionally, as they didn’t know if they might be reaching a donor through a secondary email and didn’t want to anger them.

Then, they split the audience of non-donors and sent the two emails to measure the results.

Research Question

We believe that acknowledging that a donor has not given for non-donors will achieve an increase in conversion rate.

Design

C: Control
T1: Treatment #1

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Control 0.03%
T1: Treatment #1 0.09%176.3% 99.8%

This experiment has a required sample size of 14,942 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 77,082, 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
× 176.3% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The treatment segment, with the additional sentence “my notes show you’ve never supported CaringBridge before”, produced a 176.3% increase in conversion rate, delivering nearly twice as many donors from a similar-size segment.

This shows that non-donors either aren’t aware that they aren’t supporters, or that the reminder of their current “status” is a powerful motivator to give.

This concept may function like a “last date given”, where donors are reminded that it has been some time since they have given.


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

Question about experiment #99124

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