How an inbound tribute widget 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: 04/11/2019 - 04/25/2019
In an earlier iteration of CaringBridge’s site experience, they had a “tributes” page, where people could come read tribute messages left to friends and loved ones. This page received lots of traffic, and had a high conversion rate as visitors often left a tribute message of their own—and with it, a donation. Over time, website redesigns deemphasized the tributes page, and eventually omitted it. But in September 2018, the tributes page was restored to the navigation, which greatly increased traffic to the page. However, donor conversion was slow to recover to historical benchmarks, even though there was a direct donation ask. The CaringBridge team proposed adding a place for people to leave their own tribute messages, which would then take them through an opportunity to donate. With the amount of traffic to the tributes page, this proved to have a lot of potential impact if donor conversion could be increased.
Research Question
Will adding an inbound tribute widget increase donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.16% | |||
| T1: | Tribute Widget | 0.19% | 23.1% | 97.3% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 102,517 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 260,256, 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
× 23.1% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The inbound tribute widget that put the message first (instead of the donation ask) produced a 23% increase in donor conversion. The team hypothesized that while a direct donor ask got donations, the widget aligned because it gave the reader a chance to replicate what they were seeing on the page FIRST, then that forward momentum increased the likelihood to donate.