Can Donating A Portion Of Sales To Charity Increase Conversions?

It seems good in theory.  Your company gives back by giving a portion of the purchase price to a reputable charity.  Customers feel good because they are getting what they want and they get to help out someone in need in the process.  But the big question lingering is how does giving to charity actually impact conversion rates?

In this particular case study, we are going to look at a company that does quite a bit of international business.  They have a program where they give a portion of the proceeds, in this case, $.25 for every order to the world food program.

We wanted to measure how much of an impact this donation actually had on the signup rate for their solution.
The original version of the page made no mention of the charity at all.  We had another version where we placed a banner at the top of the page stating the donation information with the purchase/signup.  The second variation placed the same banner at the bottom of the page (Pictured below).

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The results are actually pretty interesting.

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We ran over 45,000 unique visitors across the variations which resulted in about 4300 successful transactions.
What is interesting is the placement results.  When we placed the banner at the top of the page before the signup breakdown it actually slightly reduced the overall conversion but it actually increased the premium product signup by 9.9% and the revenue per visitor by 12%.

When the banner was placed at the bottom of the page the overall order conversion increased by 12.5% while the premium order signups increased 21.9% and the revenue per visitor increased 24.5%.

The overall results show that adding charity has a positive impact on the conversions but what is more important is how you actually present the information.  Placement and delivery seem to matter more than one might think.

So if you are thinking about donating a portion of the proceeds to charity be sure to test how you deliver the information but as a whole, in this particular case, giving a portion of the proceeds to charity was a good choice.

What are your thoughts?  Let us know in the comments.

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