How the minimum gift amount asked on a recurring pop-up impacts overall revenue
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: 10/05/2019 - 10/29/2019
Focus on the Family had seen significant success acquiring new recurring donors through the popup recurring gift ask. The popup was a window that would appear, prior to a gift being processed, that asked the donor to convert their one-time gift into a recurring gift. We had done several iterations of experiments on the pop-up around value proposition, percentage of donation asked, and even the minimum gift amount. We learned that if the minimum gift amount was $25 and not $15, we decreased overall revenue by 49%. After reading research around the average gift for a recurring gift, we found that $19 was what the majority of people would give. Learning this, we decided to test this gift amount as a new minimum amount against our control minimum amount of $15.
Research Question
Will changing the minimum donation amount of the recurring gift prompt from $15 to $19 increase overall revenue?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Revenue per Visitor | Relative Difference | Confidence | Average Gift | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | $15 Minimum | $7.75 | $15.75 | ||
| T1: | $19 Minimum | $4.39 | -43.3% | 100.0% | $19.00 |
This experiment was validated using 3rd party testing tools. Based upon those calculations, a significant level of confidence was met so these 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
× 53.0% decrease in conversion rate
× 20.6% increase in average gift
43.3% decrease in revenue
Key Learnings
After running this experiment for over three weeks, we found that the treatment version ($19 minimum recurring gift version) received 12 less recurring gifts than the control. And even though this minimum recurring gift amount ($19) was more than the control ($15), it would decrease annualized revenue by 43% if we put this in place.
Even though research has shown that $19 is the average gift amount for a recurring gift, we have found through this experiment that when converting a one-time gift into a recurring gift, it can have a negative effect on overall revenue and cause fewer people to convert their gift into a recurring donation.