Scrappy A/B test of donation landing pages

[garethrees]

Temporary override to the configuration variable to A/B test conversion of the service-specific donation page and the general organisation one.

This won't necessarily be a true 50:50 split (since sample is random and the various caching layers may have an impact, etc) but its the landing:conversion rate we're mostly interesting.

[alicewilliams36]

Join us, and help....pdf

Thanks Gareth! OK I've mocked up what I think the WDTK donate page should look like here. I'm not precious about it so if you want to tweak layout/wording please feel free! I'm not sure what else you need to be able to make it work on the backend so please say if I need to do anything else?!

The photos that aren't ours are:
Photo by Element5 Digital: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-steel-file-cabinet-1370294/
Photo by deep Bhullar: https://www.pexels.com/photo/statue-of-lady-justice-with-scales-30483129/

But as I say, not precious if you want to change!

[garethrees]

Looks great! We'll have to implement this on mysociety.org, not whatdotheyknow.com. That'll be a ticket for @lucascumsille , I think in https://github.com/mysociety/orgsites.

The specific page is https://www.mysociety.org/donate/support-whatdotheyknow-and-mysociety/. It'll be a bit much work to mirror the WhatDoTheyKnow banner & nav, but we can at least match the colours and maybe some other small tweaks so it's less of a jarring transition.

[lucascumsille]

Hi @alicewilliams36 and @garethrees

I made the following page:

Screen.Recording.2026-03-30.at.12.59.19.mov

Let me know if you'd like me to make any changes. Btw please ignore the Mechelen picture, I couldn't find the one that Alice used.

[alicewilliams36]

This is fantastic thankyou Lucas! Just a couple of edits:

1. Could you swap the wording 'Make Information Accessible To All' with 'Join the mySociety Supporter Network' so that the former is the larger title, and the latter is in the box above?
2. Here are 2 options of images instead of Mechelen https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xXgDAKLMyxWdUUSN1TkSoNOUqfPA5xHo?usp=drive_link
3. Is there any chance the text next to that image (starting 'when information is hidden') could be any larger?
4. Do the donate buttons jump you down to the form? Could the button below the 3 boxes be a full width button? And the same for the 20 year impact button?
5. Sorry now I've seen the scroll I think we need to move Maya's quote to below the form so you don't have to scroll too far to get to that.
   Thanks so much!

[lucascumsille]

Thank you @alicewilliams36 =)
No probs I'll make those changes now, also if after that you are happy for me to deploy I can do.
I still need to add some javascript for the buttons though.

[lucascumsille]

Here is a new version with the latest feedback:

Screen.Recording.2026-03-30.at.15.27.20.mov

Let me know if you'd like me to change anything else.

[lucascumsille]

Thanks for all the feedback from yesterday, the new page is live here

Let me know if there is anything else I need to do

[garethrees]

Will have a proper read through as soon as I can but looks way nicer! One thing I did just spot:

Provide support for the other countries using our code to run their own FOI site – from Jordan to Ukraine

There's no Alaveteli in Jordan https://alaveteli.org/deployments/

[alicewilliams36]

Oops! Sorry @lucascumsille - could you edit that to say 'from Ukraine to Colombia' (Trying to highlight the range whilst also naming countries people will care about!)

[lucascumsille]

@alicewilliams36 I just deployed that change =)

[garethrees]

This is looking great. Got two minor suggestions.

1. The "Donate £5 monthly" button in the header pre-fills the donation form with the correct options. "Other amount" doesn't. Would be nice if it did if it's an easy fix, but wouldn't worry about it if it would take hours.
2. Might be worth calling out a key phrase in the first paragraph to make it a little more scannable? One of these perhaps? Don't feel strongly about this at all though.

[garethrees]

@gbp can you have a quick look at the code side of this (i.e. this PR)? TL;DR is that we want to A/B test the performance of the general and service-specific donation pages. I've hacked this in by just overriding AlaveteliConfiguration#donation_url with hard coded values and sampling from them. Think this should be fine, but LMK if you think there would be issues. Only problem I can think of is that it wouldn't be obvious that the configured value in config/general.yml would get ignored if we were to change it.

[alicewilliams36]

@lucascumsille Just checking if you saw those little edit suggestions from Gareth? On making the text bold I think that's a good idea and think option 2 above is the best. (Your donation...)

On the donation form, relooking at that could we please change the amounts to £5, £10 and £40? And on prepopulating the form', if it's easy to prep-populate 'other amount' to £10 monthly then great but not to worry if that's a complex change as Gareth says!

[garethrees]

On the donation form, relooking at that could we please change the amounts to £5, £10 and £40?

Any reason to deviate from the main donate page? I'd have thought that might skew the results a bit (though tbf probably close enough that its not a huge concern)

[lucascumsille]

@alicewilliams36 and @garethrees thank you both I just made the changes requested:

• Bold -> Your donation helps ensure that information remains accessible to everyone — not just the powerful.
• Now "Other amount" prefills £10 monthly)

Regarding:

On the donation form, relooking at that could we please change the amounts to £5, £10 and £40?

Let me know if you'd rather stick to what we currently have or display these options instead. I think it should be easy to change, but not super sure, because I haven't done it before. It might be just changing the array for donations.

[alicewilliams36]

Thanks so much Lucas! Yes please, I've done a bit of research into donation amounts so think offering £5, £10 and £40 will be more fruitful than the current options!

[lucascumsille]

@alicewilliams36 After our talk from yesterday I have updated the donations to 5,10,40 for WDTK and Support mySociety, I also added Climate because I think it would be a bit odd to be the only one with the past values.

[alicewilliams36]

Makes sense thankyou! I'm not understanding the github notes above re the unsuccessful check - is that where @garethrees is actioning the testing function?

[garethrees]

I'm not understanding the github notes above re the unsuccessful check - is that where @garethrees is actioning the testing function?

Its some automated testing – the breakage is unrelated to this change. Will resolve.