How tangible donation 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: 03/15/2017 - 04/06/2017
CaringBridge had done some message development around the value proposition of a donation. Donations to CaringBridge help power a platform that helps people stay connected. Their value proposition centered around this connection, as multiple tests had proven. However, they hypothesized that adding a more tangible offer for the donor into the ask might increase conversion. They calculated that it takes $30 to power a single CaringBridge site for a month, and developed a treatment of their tribute widget (which appears on the most highly-trafficked sections of their site) that called this out.
Then, they launched an A/B test to determine a winner.
Research Question
Will a tangible “handle” for giving increase donations?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.10% | ||
| T1: | Treatment 1 | 0.13% | 34.3% | 96.5% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 76,726 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 176,781, 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
× 34.3% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment, with the tangible connection to the gift amount, produced a 34.3% increase in donations. This showed that while the emotional “connection-based” language had been (and was still) effective at attracting donations, there was a segment of users who needed to better understand what their gift did—and how their choice to donate could have a “tangible” impact when the entire platform they were supporting was virtual.
This prompted more testing, specifically around how to leverage this messaging in the gift array.