CaringBridge

Does a donation ask’s presentation (relative to other organic material surrounding it) impact generosity?

Experiment ID: #7429

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

Ended On: 10/18/2018

Each CaringBridge user’s private/protected site has a personal “homepage” where followers can quickly see all of the different types of information and actions related to that user’s personal health journey.

The tribute widget, an opportunity to give a gift to CaringBridge in honor of that user, was presented in the Control design (below) like an ad, where the rest of the content had a different format and organic feel.

The preliminary research question was this: is the ad-like presentation / format of that tribute widget keeping people from actually taking it seriously?

Research Question

Which tribute widget format will result in the most tribute donations?

Design

C: Original
T1: Tribute Section
T2: Tribute Inline

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Original 0.07%
T1: Tribute Section 0.07%1.8% 11.0%
T2: Tribute Inline 0.10%39.3% 99.6%

This experiment has a required sample size of 117,405 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 521,815, 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
× 39.3% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

What we discovered is that yes – the presentation format did indeed have an impact on generosity. The treatment that was formatted in appearance as closely as other natural / organic content on the page recorded a statistically significant 39.3% relative increase in donations.

This means that people who were likely to donate completely missed seeing the original ad-like ask, or at least seeing it for what it was truly worth.

What was even more interesting is that the first treatment also didn’t see a difference, even though it was presented as its own entire section. Again, this shows that the presentation itself can have an impact on how people are perceiving the ask itself. With such a large headline (that entire sections on that homepage command), and with no other closely surrounding organic content (because it is its own section), it almost comes off as overbearing in tone, despite the copy being exactly the same.


Experiment Documented by Jeff Giddens
Jeff Giddens is President of NextAfter.

Question about experiment #7429

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