How maximizing congruence between the offer and donation page impacts donor conversion rate
Americans for Prosperity
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 03/23/2020 - 04/04/2020
As leaders of Congress formulated a government response to provide relief to families, businesses and other funding priorities in response through the form of a stimulus bill, Americans for Prosperity wanted to urge lawmakers to ensure that they focused their relief on those who needed the help most—the people who have been negatively impacted by the virus.
So, they put together an open letter (a petition) to urge Congress to focus on these people over others, and began to market it to both their house file and prospecting audiences online.
In doing so, they included an instant donation appeal, but didn’t know whether or not a COVID-19 specific call to action made more sense than using their general core fundraising value proposition.
So, we put together an experiment to determine what would be most effective.
Research Question
Would aligning our ask to fund our organization’s efforts in response to the COVID-19 crisis be more effective than our standard “core fundraising appeal”?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Core Fundraising Ask | 1.6% | $0.00 | ||
| T1: | COVID-19 Relevant Ask | 2.2% | 36.7% | 95.4% | $0.00 |
This experiment has a required sample size of 4,080 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 8,408, 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
× 36.7% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
With 95.3% level of confidence, we observed an increase in donor conversion rate by +36.7% with the treatment ask (which was relevant to the recent petition + mentioning funding our efforts throughout the COVID-19 crisis).
Between the core message of the ask being different, we noticed something else that was interesting in the treatment experience.
We specifically call out a $10 gift being able to “present this open letter to 1,000 people or more“—this call out is using “chip in” gift language that we’ve dabbled with across other experiments.
Approximately 20% (one of every five gifts) secured through the treatment experience were at the $10 gift level. However, the revenue from gifts of this size only accounted for approximately 7% of the overall treatment gift revenue totals.
By presenting a “micro goal” to prospective audiences and letting them know that even a gift of that amount could have a great impact in our efforts, we saw an increase in results through the treatment experience.
Where possible, it’s always good to maximize congruency between the previous offer and the donation appeal.