This article is co-authored by Joel Bray, Director of Measurement & Analytics, Authentic and Megan Hughes, Communications Director, ActBlue
- Authentic partnered with ActBlue to run a limited-access series of A/B tests aimed at optimizing recurring opt-ins on ActBlue contribution forms.
- The learnings from this months-long experiment, including different ways for donors to opt-in and for organizations to provide custom branding on the recurring upsell, are now being introduced sitewide.
Recurring donations are highly valuable for any campaign or organization. Unlike one-time donations, they provide a more sustainable and reliable source of funding, allowing organizations to hire staff, plan budgets, and make long-term strategic decisions. Last winter, ActBlue invited Authentic to participate in a limited-access series of A/B tests aimed at optimizing recurring opt-ins on ActBlue contribution forms.
Authentic jumped at the opportunity.
Founded in 2018, Authentic is a team of impact-driven digital experts who have a proven history of delivering groundbreaking results using data-informed tactics for the causes we care about. We take pride in designing thoughtful experiments for our clients that produce evidence-based recommendations.
A fundamental part of good test design is ensuring a sufficient amount of data, which allows for the detection of small differences in donor behavior. By contrast, with a typical A/B test that might be run on a single account, the number of visitors and baseline conversion rates are often insufficient to produce meaningful or generalizable results, except with the largest of clients. At Authentic, we’ve done firmwide experiments simultaneously across dozens of clients over the past several years, enabling us to do sophisticated meta-analyses. Participation in this program was a natural fit.
Sample size considerations are particularly acute with recurring opt-ins, which are a subset of total donations and thus baseline conversion rates are especially low. By partnering with ActBlue, we would have greater confidence in the results. This program also presented us with an opportunity to give our clients early access to features that we normally cannot experiment with on contribution forms, like the style and copy of recurring opt-ins.
At Authentic, we reached out to each of our ActBlue clients, and 90% eagerly agreed to participate in the program. “We appreciate that Authentic and ActBlue partnered up to optimize our digital program, and I’m even more glad the results are going to help candidates up and down the ballot,” said Brad Elkins, Campaign Manager for Adam Schiff for Senate.
The experiments themselves examined a variety of ways that potential donors interact with contribution forms. For example, when users are prompted to make a monthly donation, the original form looked like this:
In the A/B test, we examined two alternative designs:
Other tests took the original recurring upsell and made it more visually-appealing, while simultaneously creating opportunities for entity-specific branding. Here’s the original design:
And here are the two treatment options:
Throughout the first half of 2024, during which seven tests were run, our clients had an opportunity to customize the donor experience and convert people into sustaining supporters. Now, all organizations and candidates on ActBlue are receiving sitewide updates. Instead of having only the original toggle option for recurring donations, organizations can now choose to implement a checkbox design with custom copy:
We’re also particularly excited about the recurring upsell designs, which give clients a way to customize the copy when donors are asked to make a recurring donation after payment. This gives organizations an additional chance to communicate directly to donors about the impact of their monthly contributions.
Moving forward, we’re excited about future opportunities to partner with ActBlue to run well-designed experiments that produce robust results and help our clients succeed.
Joel Bray is the Director of Measurement & Analytics at Authentic. They have more than a decade of political and scientific experience in quantitative research, experimental design, data analytics and visualization, and statistical modeling. They have designed and executed award-winning email testing and reactivation programs at Authentic while producing pivotal insights and cutting-edge tools to ensure that each team is making evidence-based decisions.