Focus on the Family

How the amount you ask for impacts recurring donor conversion and overall revenue during year-end

Experiment ID: #9803

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: 12/04/2018 - 01/08/2019

Focus on the Family has found great success with their recurring gift pop-up feature on their donation pages. This feature presents people with the option of changing their one-time gift into a recurring gift right before their gift is process. The feature is a pop-up that has value proposition on it for why they should become a recurring donor and lowers the gift amount to be 60% of what their original one-time gift was. A person would either click, “No, make my original gift” or “Yes, make my gift recurring”. We hypothesized that decreasing the gift amount to be 25% of what their original gift was might increase the number of people willing to becoming a recurring donor. 

Research Question

Can we increase the number of pledgers without impacting overall revenue?

Design

C: 60%
T1: 25%

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidenceAverage Gift
C: 60% 0.26%$0.00
T1: 25% 0.35%31.8% 99.9%$0.00

This experiment has a required sample size of 33,198 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 208,928, 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
× 31.8% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

By decreasing the gift amount on the recurring gift pop-up to be 25% of what their original gift was instead of 60%, we were able to increase recurring donors by 32%. However, since we are trying to improve recurring revenue, it is important to take into account the downstream impact of asking for a lower dollar amount. We also need to take into account that not every donor would have experienced this experiment since the minimum ask amount was $10.

When we analyze the gifts of those that would have been impacted by the experiment (gifts greater than $15), we find that the average gift of the control (60% of the original gift amount) was $87.78. The average gift of the treatment (25% of the original gift amount) was $85.61. Knowing that the average gift of the treatment was only 2.5% lower than the control, this means that the ask of 25% the original value would result in both more recurring donors and increased revenue (despite asking for a lower gift).

However, since this was run during the year end giving season, we are going to relaunch this experiment to see if we can re-validate this experiment without the year end urgency.


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

Question about experiment #9803

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