How a dropdown on a donate button 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: 05/21/2019 - 07/20/2019

For Caringbridge, the primary navigation has always had a prominent donation button in the top right corner. This button took all potential donors to a generic donation page that offered both one-time and recurring giving options.

There was a hypothesis that since a recurring donor and a one-time donor are two distinct segments, it may make sense to split this audience at the navigation level. Doing this would allow for targeted donation pages for each segment which may help increase the relevance and perceived value of the offer.

Research Question

Will adding a drop down navigation option for one-time and recurring gifts increase overall (or recurring) giving?

Design

C: Control

T1: Dropdown Button

Results

This experiment has a required sample size of 15,886,371 in order to be valid. Unfortunately, the required sample size was not met and a level of confidence above 95% was not met so the experiment results are not valid.

Key Learnings

After running for two months with over 10 million visitors, we found that the drop down navigation offer had no statistically significant impact on overall giving or the likelihood for individuals to give a recurring gift. This could potentially suggest that we’re bringing this split too high up into the conversion funnel. Instead of the navigation, it may make more sense to emphasize this segmentation split (with associated value proposition) on the donation page itself. Similar experiments have been run using tabs on donation forms with success. That would be a natural next step.