How using a brand name in donor acquisition affects conversion rate

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: 07/18/2019 - 08/04/2019

CaringBridge had long acquired many donors through their “tribute giving“ pages, which allow people to make a gift in honor of a friend or loved one using CaringBridge. The language on the donation page let the donor know that their gift made “this site” possible. The CaringBridge customer care team hypothesized that using the name “CaringBridge” instead of “this site” would increase clarity and decrease refund rate. The development team was open to this, but wanted to make sure that using the brand name didn’t negatively affect conversion. They developed a page with the same creative, but using “CaringBridge” in place of “this site”. 

Research Question

How will using a brand name in donor acquisition affect conversion rate?

Results

This experiment has a required sample size of 1,709,243 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

Ultimately, the brand name performed no differently than the “this site” language. This was a positive development as it cleared the way to test this downstream to increase clarity and reduce refund rate.