How organization-centric language affects donor conversion
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
Timeframe: 04/14/2016 - 05/05/2016
CaringBridge had performed several successful experiments to personalize the copy on their “tribute” donation pages. But user feedback had shown one interesting organizational fact: most people didn’t know CaringBridge was a nonprofit organization. This had produced confusion before, so they developed a single sentence of copy to add to the page in pursuit of clarity:
“Nearly 90 percent of our funding comes from people like you who have experienced the power of CaringBridge firsthand.”
This copy was never tested, and we developed a hypothesis that it might be what we call “organizational-centric” language. This type of language is not inherently bad, but it might clash with the tribute page, which is highly personal.
We developed a treatment that eliminated this sentence and set out to determine a winner.
Research Question
Will removing organizational-centric language increase donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 21.8% | ||
| T1: | Additional Copy Removed | 23.2% | 6.6% | 90.8% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 6,567 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 9,734, and the level of confidence is not above 95% the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
The treatment (without the sentence) increased conversion by 6.6% — not an overwhelming amount, but enough to show that taking the donor’s attention away from the person impacted by the gift reduced the likelihood that they would give.
This doesn’t solve the marketing problem that many people don’t know CaringBridge is a nonprofit, but it tells us that the donation page is not the place to communicate that.