If a non-profit wants to maximize donations, should they ask a donor to enter their personal information into a form or select an amount they want to contribute as a first step? The answer might surprise you.
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Full Transcript:
MJ Castells: OK, so the test I’m going to talk about today is for one of our nonprofit clients, this is a environmental and climate change nonprofit that we work with.
They obviously collect donations, so the test that we’re running on is on their donation page.
This is what their donation page looks like regularly. It’s when you land on the donation page, you get your first step, which is this intake form which you have to put in all your information up front.
Our test, however, decided to switch up the first step and the second step.
But as you can see the in the V0, lots of fields to fill out immediately upon page load.
That’s what desktop looks like. We ran it on both desktop and mobile, of course.
And in our V1, what we did was the first step was actually the amount. So as soon as you land on the page, you have to select what amount you want to donate.
You can select whether you want to become a monthly donor or you want to donate once and then once you hit continue, you go on to the original first step.
So now the second step, which is the information step.
And then finally, the third step is the payment step.
So again, we ran this on both desktop and mobile.
This was – the idea basically was can we collect more donations if we put the donation of select the amount selection up front?
So do folks have any questions?
This was pretty, pretty simple test, but pretty interesting, pretty interesting to see what resulted of it.
Does anybody have any questions or theories?
Cristi Alvarez: MJ, I have a question – So you mentioned that this first step to select amount, is it always defaulted to 25? Or do you have to like select which one?
MJ Castells: It, yeah, it does default to 25. We’ve tested into that previously, to default to different amounts.
We also like tested into test, starting with like the highest amount to the lowest amount, we’ve tested like different amounts.
We’ve tested a lot into that little space – the standard and the one that seems to continue to win is like just landing on 25, but yeah.
Cristi Alvarez: Yeah, my vote would be for the variation just because it’s kind of a more engaging first step, and it’s like selecting your dollar amount versus like a block of form fields to fill out.
Some might just be a little bit more compelling to start it off. Yes, I would think V1. You want any other insights from anyone.
Alex Loesch: I actually think control because if you are asking for some information upfront, it’s kind of like foot in the door questions and then you’re qualifying them.
And then once they make it to select the amount of stuff you would think, maybe they’re a little bit more qualified to continue the process as opposed to selecting the amount right up front.
Chris Neumann: I have a similar take, but I was going to say they control because it’s like more of a micro comment, like once you’ve given your name and email address than your sort of a little bit more committed and be willing to put the money in nice.
I think it’s like building up the commitment level is how it works generally.
MJ Castells: All interesting points.
Cristi Alvarez: All right. Let’s vote.
So for if you think control won, you’ll put a thumbs down.
If you thought it was inconclusive, completely flat, go sideways.
And if you thought the variation won, you’ll do a nice big thumbs up, so go ahead and cast your vote.
MJ Castells: OK. So this one is actually a pretty big win.
Surprisingly enough, I think Chris and Alex like to your points of like kind of like the micro commitment is something that for sure we thought about.
But it seems that folks are actually more willing to make a donation if they have to select the amount first.
Like, you kind of like, get them to select the amount.
And then once you’ve selected the amount, it’s like, OK, now we’ve got to just under my information to do it, but we’re seeing like a huge increase – well, this is huge for for donations, right?
Increase in national donations with pretty, pretty nice stats sig, seeing a pretty nice increase in monthly donations one time donations.
This test is just like killing it the step one click, which is reversed on each of the V0’s V1’s, but essentially on V1 users are more likely to continue on to that first to the second step and then continue on to the third step.
So overall, doing really, really great.
One thing that I thought was actually really interesting is that usually this client has a lot of desktop users, but this win is actually being driven really heavily by mobile users.
So just overall really great wins. And yeah, really awesome. Awesome test that we run here.
Cristi Alvarez: Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe to have more test ideas sent to your inbox.