How trustmarks on a donation page impacted donations and revenue
Dallas Theological Seminary
The DTS mission is, “to glorify God by equipping godly servant-leaders for the proclamation of His Word and the building up of the body of Christ worldwide.” They strive to help men and women fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, or more simply: Teach Truth. Love Well.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 11/05/2020 - 12/10/2020
In previous experiments, we have found that adding trust marks near the donation button on a donation page can lead to an increase in donations. However, we wanted to take this learning a step further and test how the presence of ANY trust marks and the presence of CERTAIN trust marks would impact revenue.
The control version of the donation page featured two of the organization’s standard trust marks, with the first treatment removing all trust marks and the second treatment containing the standard trust marks and the additional Charity Navigator trust mark.
The Charity Navigator trust mark showed the organization’s score/ranking of 75% with the “Give with Confidence” banner. The placement for all trust marks was directly beneath the donate button at the bottom of the page.
Research Question
We believe that adding a Charity Navigator trust mark for donation page visitors will achieve increase in number of gifts and average gift size.
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 14.3% | ||
| T1: | No Trustmarks | 21.2% | 48.7% | 81.7% |
| T2: | Charity Navigator Trustmark | 23.5% | 64.3% | 91.7% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 218 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 326, and the level of confidence is not above 95% the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
While we did not reach a valid level of confidence for the experiment, what we observed through this experiment was the treatment with no trust marks and the treatment with the added Charity Navigator trust mark were both seeing an overall increase in conversion rate. However, when we analyze revenue and average gift performance for each version, the first treatment with no charity marks saw a slight decrease in revenue compared to the control while the second treatment with the additional Charity Navgiator trust mark was approaching a valid lift in revenue (58.3% with a 91% level of confidence). We also noted a few segments that were impacted directly, with an increase in conversion rate for both tablet and email visitors.
Notable changes to other metrics due to the experiment:
- Revenue experienced a 58.3% increase with a 91% level of confidence.
Observations of the impact on other visitor segments in the experiment:
- Tablet visitors had a 33.3% increase in donations with a 92% level of confidence.
- Email visitors had a 55.0% increase in donations with an 87% level of confidence.
While we will want to further experiment to reach a valid conclusion to identify the optimal version of the form, based on these learnings, we will want to make sure future appeals for tablet and email visitors are pointing to donation pages that indicate evidentials from a credible third party to maximize average gift from these segments and drive overall revenue.
