CaringBridge

How visual reinforcement on the donation page increases mobile conversion during a match

Experiment ID: #12019

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: 02/20/2019

CaringBridge was running a Valentine’s Day fundraising campaign and had a $25,000 matching gift. They knew that most of their donations on these short, high-urgency appeals came through a few donation funnels that landed on the same page. While previous tests had focused on driving traffic, they wanted to see if they could optimize conversion by driving home the match language on the two days that the gift was applied. They created two versions of a sticky top banner for the donation page—one that emphasized the match for “your” gift, and another that emphasized the match for “all donations”. They launched a three-way experiment split between mobile and desktop to see how it affected conversions on mobile devices. 

Research Question

How will visual reinforcement affect donor conversion on the donation page during a short-term matching gift appeal?

Design

C: Control
T1: Header (personal)
T2: Header (all donations)

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Control 13.7%
T1: Header (personal) 16.0%16.5% 90.2%
T2: Header (all donations) 13.9%1.1% 9.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 2,787 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 4,141, and the level of confidence is not above 95% the experiment results are not valid.

Key Learnings

The personal match language expressed on the sticky bar increased conversion by 16.5%. Though this only reached a 90.1% level of confidence (and is not valid) it was close enough  (especially when combined with the desktop results) to show that this visual reinforcement is a powerful tool to provide extra motivation through the donation process—even if it is only one step. 


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

Question about experiment #12019

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