Save the Children

How expanding the value proposition on the primary donation page impacts donor conversion

Experiment ID: #51527

Save the Children

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 01/11/2021 - 02/12/2021

During an analysis of the Save the Children (STC) primary donation page, a research panel noted that the page provided minimal details on the history of the organization and why donations to STC are important. When we expanded this value proposition based upon information found in other areas of the site, the perceived appeal of the information and likelihood for them to make a donation increased significantly.

With this in mind, we hypothesized that testing new value proposition copy on the primary donation page based upon the copy used on the “Why Save the Children” page of the website might increase donor conversion on the donation page. The goal with the new, expanded value proposition was to emphasize the impact the donor would have when making a donation and how much their donation was needed to help children around the world.

This experiment split the site traffic in half from all channels going to and landing on the primary donation page.

Research Question

Will expanding the value proposition to emphasize the impact the donor can have by making a gift increase donor conversion?

Design

C: Control

T1: Expanded Value Proposition

Results

	Treatment Name	Conv. Rate	Relative Difference	Confidence	Average Gift
C:	Control	10.9%			$0.00
T1:	Expanded Value Proposition	11.1%	1.6%	40.1%	$0.00

This experiment has a required sample size of 258,643 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 the experiment for four weeks, we found no overall difference in conversion rate from the expanded value proposition. Because the primary donation page gets traffic from many different channels and motivations of people, it’s important to look at what happened within individual those segments to better understand the learnings and results from this experiment.

When the homepage was the entry point to the donation page, we saw a slight lift in conversion (5% with an 89% LOC). This data segment had the highest LOC from the entire experiment.

When the donation page was the entry point, the only increase in conversion (though not statistically valid) was for mobile devices and new users. This aligns with the fact that new users tend to need more information and a stronger value proposition before they decide to give. It also highlights a potential hypothesis around traffic coming directly to the primary donation page from other channels is already highly motivated and the expanded value proposition – that took a softer, more donor-centric approach – created more of a barrier for the motivated traffic then helped them convert.

It’s important to note that there was no statistically valid negative impact on conversion with the expanded value proposition variation. This tells us that there are more audiences and segments who positively responded to the value proposition.

Because of this and the trend we saw in prospective donors coming from channels that most likely had harder hitting call-to-actions and were sent directly to the donation page, we propose testing the expanded value proposition again but nuanced with stronger language and CTA’s to reflect the more conversion-centric audience.

Experiment Documented by Nathan Hill

Nathan Hill is Vice President, NextAfter Institute.

Question about experiment #51527

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