GetUp's easy test that increased donations by 61%

TL;DR: having your donation amounts higher up on a page significantly increases donor conversion, in some cases up to 61% more. The below is the report of a test GetUp ran in 2014. The test was conducted by Ben Raue – you can contact him for more information, ben@getup.org.au

Background

In early 2014, we ran an experiment where we compare the placement of the section of the donation form that asks the donor to nominate an amount.

We ran it as part of our 'Shipping News' campaign to raise money for journalism around asylum seeker issues.

The Australian government has been sending asylum seekers to prisons in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and these governments have been making it very difficult for journalists to report on asylum seeker issues. Our campaign focused on raising money to support journalism on these issues.

See one of our donation pages on this issue here.

Our donations form is on a single page. First a person provides an email address, and the form then prompts the person to provide any necessary data we don’t already have for that email address.

At the time, the part of the form that asked for credit card information was above the section which asked the donor to specify a donation amount.

Hypothesis

Moving the section asking for a donation amount above credit card information would result in a higher dollar-to-click ratio, and generally result in more donations.

Structure of experiment

Our control page used the existing form, which had the credit card information above the donation amount on the form.

Our experimental page swapped the position of these two parts of the donation form. You can see a mock-up of how this part of our donation form looked during the experiment at the end of this document.

We ran this experiment twice on two different email lists. On each email list, two randomised subgroups received the same email, but were directed to either the control page or the experimental page.

We tested the experiment first on a portion of our refugee list, which consists of members with a particular interest in refugee issues.

We then also ran the experiment on a portion of our non-refugee list, which includes all members who haven’t taken action on refugee issues.

The email to the refugee list was sent to 30,000 email addresses. The email to the non-refugee list was sent to 720,000 email addresses.

The control page had the donation amount section lower on the page:

and the experiment page tested whether moving up the section which asked for a dollar amount would result in a larger dollar-to-click ratio.

Results The experiment was very positive. In every experiment, the dollar-per-click ratio was much higher for the experiment than for the control. We count a “click” every time an email recipient clicks on a link in an email that takes them to the donation page.

For the experiment on the most active group, there was a subtle increase in the number of donors, and a substantial increase in the size of donations for each donor. This produced a 40% increase in dollar per click. For the experiment on the less active group, there was a subtle increase in the size of donations (7%) but a much larger increase in the number of donors per click (45%) producing a 56% increase in dollar per click.    

The experiment was very positive. In every experiment, the dollar-per-click ratio was much higher for the experiment than for the control. For the full email to the refugee list, we used the old donations form. I estimate that the email would have earnt 41.6% more ($67k vs $47k) if we had used the new form.

The biggest experiment was run on the full remaining list (non-refugee list). The experiment earnt 61.5% more. I estimate that if we had sent the full list to the old page, it would have earnt $21k, but if we had sent the full list to the new page, we would have earnt $34k.

We'll be implementing this change for all of our donations pages in the near future.