How suggested gift amounts affects donations
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: 06/16/2015 - 06/22/2015
As part of their fiscal year end campaign, Dallas Theological Seminary wanted to find a way to lower the number of decisions donors had to make when giving their gift. The idea was the suggest a gift amount based upon their previous giving history with the hypothesis that this would lower the friction of the giving form.
To test this hypothesis, we set up an experiment to split traffic between their standard blank gift amount field and a form that would populate three different buttons based upon their last gift amount (this was passed in via the querystring).
Research Question
Does suggesting gift amounts based upon previous giving increase the revenue and conversion rate?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Blank Field | 2.4% | ||
| T1: | Buttons | 1.1% | -54.9% | 90.4% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 759 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 1,105, and the level of confidence is not above 95% the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
By suggesting a gift amount, the overall donation page conversion dropped by 54.9%. This was a surprising result given the success of this type of experiment with other research partners.
This outcome taught us something significant about DTS donors. The average gift for their online donors is significantly higher than the most other nonprofits. As a result, the suggested gift amounts were far larger than would normally be seen on a donation page. It is our hypothesis that these larger gift options scared away potential donors to the campaign by presuming too much. We get better results when we let the donor determine their own level of generousity.