Harvest Ministries

How simplifying donation page copy affects conversion.

Experiment ID: #5595

Harvest Ministries

Harvest Christian Fellowship exists to bring Christians closer to God and to bring nonbelievers to a saving relationship with Him by showing how God's Word and faith in Him are applicable and relevant to everyday life.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 10/24/2016 - 10/29/2016

Harvest Ministries offers a free online course called, Tell Someone. After a person signs up for the free online course, they are taken to a confirmation/donation page. While the course has acquired instant donors and donations really well, they wanted to see if they could optimize the page. Their hypothesis was that the page had a lot of information on it creating friction for the end user. They developed a treatment that simplified the copy and broke the content down into 5 important things/steps. They set up the test and split the traffic coming to the donation page.

Research Question

Which donation page would acquire more donations?

Design

C: Control
T1: Simplified - 5 Important Things to Know

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Control 3.1%
T1: Simplified - 5 Important Things to Know 5.6%82.2% 97.6%

This experiment has a required sample size of 585 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 1,883, 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
× 82.2% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The treatment saw a 82.2% increase in donations! The control created too much mental friction because of the amount of content and copy. The donation ask ended up getting lost in all of it. By simplifying the content through a step by step process and order, we helped the end-user mentally walk through what we wanted them to do resulting in more people making a donation.


Experiment Documented by Courtney Gaines
Courtney Gaines is Vice President at NextAfter.

Question about experiment #5595

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