CaringBridge

How using quantified social proof impacts someones interest in making a recurring gift

Experiment ID: #26502

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

Ended On: 12/12/2019

CaringBridge was running a popup for certain visitors that had previously visited a CaringBridge site. These visitors were shown the popup when they went to leave the site and it prompted them to become a recurring donor. We had previously tested a personal signer and personal message on the popup without success so this time we decided to run an experiment to see if people were more likely to click through to the recurring giving donation page when they knew how many other people were a recurring donor (social proof). We’ve seen in other experiments and research how social proof can often increase giving so wanted to see if it would apply here to CaringBridge donors and for a recurring gift ask.

Research Question

Will adding social proof to the recurring gift ask messaging increase clickthrough rate?

Design

C: Control
T1: Social proof

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Control 0.64%
T1: Social proof 0.72%12.1% 95.3%

This experiment has a required sample size of 85,293 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 178,676, 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
× 12.1% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

Adding social proof to the popup increased overall conversion by 12%. It is worth noting that the social proof was a smaller number (328 fellow supporters) instead of what is often seen with large numbers. This is a concept that could be further refined with additional testing.


Experiment Documented by Jeff Giddens
Jeff Giddens is President of NextAfter.

Question about experiment #26502

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.