CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I ran across this interesting article on creating a fund raising/online payment system:

http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/

Specifically they did a huge amount of a/b testing to move from the 'before optimization' to the 'after optimization' contribution page as shown here:

http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-screenshot.jpg

The 'after optimization' page had a 49% higher conversion rate.

So, this got me thinking.  The current civicrm contribution page actually looks a lot like the 'before optimization' page.

How hard would it be to use some themeing etc. to mod the CiviCRM contribution page to be at least somewhat more like the 'after optimization' page?

It would be nice to duplicate their whole system, but trying to keep things simple, it would be nice to have a very simplified 'start contribution' page like the Obama one, with maybe 6 different price options in large, simple buttons.  And nothing else.

Once you've made that selection it takes you to the current CiviContribute page, but with the amounts all pre-filled in accordance with the amounts selected on the start page.  And of course the name, address, etc, all pre-filled in if the person is logged in or using a link with checksum.

This could simplify the contribution process quite a lot for most people.  And having that simple 'select how much you will donate' form (and that form ONLY) on the front page makes a lot of sense.  Once people have chosen their donation amount they are 'committed' whereas those seeing a wall of empty form fields are more likely to give up before they even get started.

Any thoughts on how hard this might be to implement?  Could some of the form hooks be used to set the contribution values on the civicontribute page based on the values selected on the 'start' page?  And maybe the altercontent hook to hide those fields?