How straightforward copy and a quantified ask 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: 03/16/2017 - 03/21/2017
CaringBridge had run an experiment that implemented more “need-based”, common language on their tribute widget, which was the start of the giving process on their journal pages. They had run this experiment as part of a match, so they wanted to re-run the experiment without the matching language to see if that impacted conversion.
The control asked visitors to “honor” their friend or loved one with a donation. The treatment used much more straightforward language: “Can you help power their site?” It also incorporated a quantified ask: “$30 keeps their site online for a month.”
They set up an A/B test to determine a winner in a non-match scenario.
Research Question
Will more straightforward language with a quantified ask increase donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.10% | ||
| T1: | Quantified Ask | 0.17% | 63.9% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 23,982 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 261,042, 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
× 63.9% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment copy in the tribute widget produced a 63.9% increase in donor conversion—a full 23 percentage points higher than the copy with the match language. This suggests that CaringBridge hit on some powerful language that hits home with their donors, and the match language, while providing an incentive, might actually complicate the value proposition.
This experiment suggests more testing around the quantified ask.