Skip to main content
inconclusive+40.0% lift

Landing Page: Sierra Club: Donation Page Conversion Optimisation

Hypothesis

Sierra Club's donation pages were not connecting individual donation actions to tangible environmental outcomes, reducing the emotional urgency that drives donation completion. Reframing donation asks around specific, concrete outcomes would increase completion rates.

CTALanding PageNonprofitnonprofitdonationfundraisingimpact-framingrecurring-giving

Test Results

Key Learning

Context: Without clear urgency signals, users delay their decision on the landing page, leading to drop-offs and abandoned sessions.

What was tested: For nonprofit donation pages, anchoring each donation amount tier to a specific, tangible environmental outcome (e.g., '$25 protects 10 acres') significantly outperforms generic impact statements. Setting the monthly donation option as the default (with clear ability to switch to one-time) increases recurring donation rates without reducing overall completions. Progress indicators showing campaign momentum increase urgency and completion rates for time-bound fundraising campaigns.

Result: No statistically significant difference was detected. This null result is still valuable — it narrows the search space and helps calibrate your minimum detectable effect for future tests.

How to Apply This to Your Site

This experiment tested landing page: sierra club: donation page conversion optimisation but produced no statistically significant change. The test was run on a landing page page in the nonprofit industry. Inconclusive results suggest this particular change may not be a priority — focus testing effort on higher-impact areas.

Before you test: Consider that cta tests typically require adequate traffic to reach statistical significance. Run your test for at least 2 full business cycles to account for weekly traffic patterns.

This result reached 95% statistical confidence, meaning there is a very low probability the observed effect was due to chance. Results at this confidence level are generally considered reliable for making business decisions.

What Was Tested

CROMetrics ran donation page optimisation tests for the Sierra Club environmental advocacy organisation. Tests included donation amount suggestion sizing, impact framing (specific environmental outcomes per donation amount), monthly vs one-time default selection, and page layout. The programme targeted the conversion gap between donation page visitors and completed donations.

Methodology

Confidence Level
95%
Lift Range
30.0% to 50.0%

Build On These Learnings

Save your own experiments, spot winning patterns across your test history, and stop repeating what's already been tried.

Related Experiments

inconclusive

Listing: Visible Payment Options

Context: The primary call-to-action on the listing isn't converting at its potential — design, copy, or placement may be the bottleneck.

winner

Does Pinning a Mobile Checkout CTA Improve Conversion?

Sticky mobile CTAs can compress time-on-page meaningfully (~15% faster) without sacrificing engagement signals — users converted at a directionally higher rate AND moved through the page faster, suggesting reduced hesitation rather than rushed clicks. The result was shipped via 90/10 holdout monitoring rather than traditional 50/50 A/B inference — the high baseline (~85%) and limited mobile traffic made full A/B underpowered, so the team chose a holdout-validated rollout as the deliberate methodology. Bayesian P(variant > control) was ~0.90, supporting the directional ship call. Worth noting: external research flags sticky CTAs as context-dependent — they help when the primary action is buried below the fold, but can hurt on shorter pages where the original CTA is already visible.

inconclusive-4.7%

Listing: Filled Or Ghost Buttons

Context: The primary call-to-action on the listing isn't converting at its potential — design, copy, or placement may be the bottleneck.

loser

Does Adding a Shopping CTA to the Main Navigation Drive Plan Views?

A CTA's click rate is not its conversion contribution. This test surfaced one of the most consistently underweighted patterns in CRO: behavioral diagnostics almost always tell a more honest story than the topline. The aggregate result looked like a tiny non-significant lift (+1%); the diagnostic revealed that of every 100 button clicks, only 6 reached the next funnel step. Two failure modes converged: (1) copy intent mismatch — the chosen label read as 'create account' rather than 'shop,' so a large share of clicks came from users trying to log in / manage their account from support and customer pages; (2) extra modal step before the destination page added friction without value. The aggregate lift was partially cannibalization from higher-converting paths. The transferable pattern: when introducing a global navigation element, validate the click→conversion ratio per source page, not just the topline. High clicks from low-intent pages creates a false signal of engagement that can mask poor performance.

Explore More Experiments