The Client
Since 1927, St. Joseph's Indian School has provided care and education for Native American boys and girls. St. Joseph's Indian School's stated mission is to provide for the basic welfare of children (food, clothing and medical care) with special emphasis on the spiritual, emotional and educational development of each child, while respecting their culture and heritage.
The Problem
St. Joseph’s Indian School (STJO) offers a premium to individuals who sign up for its eClub, a monthly email update about the children it serves. The organization provides a stationery kit and mailing labels as an incentive to join. The online sign-up box consistently yielded an organic registration rate that was significantly higher than the industry benchmark of three percent. Although this incentive strategy enabled the organization to amass a sizeable email file, the online and offline fundraising value of these prospects was questionable. An analysis of website traffic showed a significant number of registrants were direct mail donors or came from websites promoting “freebies.” STJO appreciated the importance of email file growth and full postal contact information for online constituents, but wondered about the long-term value of eClub contacts who were motivated only by the premium offer.
How We Solved It
STJO engaged the expertise of Convio consultants who devised a multi-phase testing and analysis program to better understand – and improve – the opt-ins for premium (stationery kit, labels) and non-premium (free monthly email updates) components of the eClub offer. A Convio interactive specialist installed custom web code that randomly displayed one of six eClub sign-up options to each visitor to www.stjo.org, and attached offer source codes to the opt-in mechanism. Once a constituent registered for one of the offers, they were placed automatically into one of six distinct groups. For each group, the number of registrations per unique visitor was tracked. The Convio interactive specialist performed an analysis and determined that there was a statistically significant difference between each of the tests and the baseline.
The Results
The existing premium package plus a graphic emerged as the clear winner over the control and other tests. The addition of a graphic increased the registration rate in all cases, but most significantly for the two premium offers. The overall site registration rate now averages 12.28 percent, up from 8.86 percent in the five months leading up to the offer test. As a next step, STJO will conduct additional analyses to understand the fundraising and online engagement value of the premium/graphic offer versus the non-premium/graphic offer. The results of additional testing will help to determine the best offer to use moving forward.
Convio products used: Email Marketing
