Focus on the Family

How using value focused copy on a donation button can impact conversion.

Experiment ID: #3318

Focus on the Family

Focus on the Family is a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God's design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 04/05/2018 - 04/23/2018

Focus on the Family gets significant traffic to their broadcast pages on their website. On each episode page, they offer a featured resource that people can get when they make a donation to Focus on the Family. To get the featured resource, the button currently says, “Give Now”. We hypothesized that having a call to action that was focused more on what a person gets than what they have to do to get the offer might increase conversion. We developed a treatment button that said, “Get Your CD Here”.

Research Question

Which button call-to-action would increase conversion?

Design

C: Give Now Button
T1: Get Your Resource Here Button

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Give Now Button 2.0%
T1: Get Your Resource Here Button 3.3%64.7% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 1,163 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 70,496, 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
× 64.7% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The treatment increased clicks to the donation page by 64.7%. While this is a great metric to look at, it doesn’t tell the full story. We ultimately want to increase donations and revenue, not just clicks. When we analyzed the test results even more, we found that while the treatment significantly increased the number of people getting to the donation page, it decreased donor conversion by 4%.

The increase in clicks tells us that people were more highly motivated to “get” the resource than to give a donation.

The decrease in donations hypothetically tells us a couple of things:
1. The initial messaging on the resource feature told people they could get the resource when they gave a gift could be strengthened. The donation part of that messaging may have gotten lost with the strong appeal of the button CTA
2. The messaging on the donation page could more clearly communicate how people can get the free resource by adding copy to this page and strengthening it’s value proposition.

The approach that was taken with the treatment button copy on this broadcast page can potentially have significant impact on donations and revenue by testing out some of the new hypothesis that came from the results of this experiment.


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

Question about experiment #3318

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