How streamlining an inline donation ask 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: 08/29/2019 - 09/08/2019
CaringBridge had a donation ask embedded in the “flow” of journal posts for CaringBridge authors. For many years, this “widget” had branded and set apart from the other posts with a border and a separate background. The team wondered if this made the ask look “too much like an ad”. They developed a simpler, streamlined version of this, based off of research that had happened elsewhere in the site, and launched a test to determine if the design affected donor conversion.
Research Question
Will streamlining an inline donation ask affect donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.12% | |||
| T1: | Streamlined Version | 0.16% | 27.5% | 98.3% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 92,671 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 276,232, 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
× 27.5% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The streamlined ask increased donor output 27.5% over a week’s time, but quickly validated due to the difference in conversion rates. While still low overall, this passive ask clearly benefitted from “fitting in” on the page—the team’s hypothesis is that the ask no longer suffers from “banner blindness” and now is more equally weighted with the journal content, which means more people read and respond.