What We Learned Driving 9x ROAS In Donations Using ONLY Facebook
Background
Another Rat Race Marketing client put us in touch with a friend who runs a small, non-profit, cat sanctuary in North Carolina called Gotham City Kitties. Historically, we have not worked with many non-profits. However, we couldn’t say no to helping out a great cause and flexing our marketing muscles in a different direction.
The non-profit did not have much experience in fundraising and we decided that with all the cat memes on the internet, Facebook would be a great platform to drive awareness and donations to the non-profit.
Constraints
We were working with a VERY limited budget from a sponsor of the non-profit, so we wanted to use every last dollar on advertising, instead of building and hosting a website. We decided to go all in on Facebook advertising and use Facebook Payments platform, the Network for Good’s Donor Advised Fund, a 501c3 nonprofit, to run all the donations through. They don’t take a fee which is another unique value proposition of using Facebook for this campaign.
There was also limited past creative (images, copy, etc.) to use and only images of the cats, so we had to act fast to get some Facebook friendly posts up and running.
The Process
The process we used was as follows:
Interviewed the owner to draft a creative brief and write Facebook post copy
Signed up for Facebook Payments
Used Canva to create several images and videos with custom text and creative overlay
Set up Facebook Audiences for Top and Bottom of Funnel
Added Donate Buttons to all posts
Created a Page Fundraiser to promote via Ads
Discovery
Through our discovery interview with the non-profit founder, we learned about their unique history rescuing cats, the level of care they provided, and the amount of money required to run the operation. This helped us create compelling hooks for the ads.
Facebook Payments
We had some delays and issues getting approved for Facebook Payments as a non-profit, but we succeeded in doing so after a few weeks of back and forth with Facebook support. Keep this in mind if you are looking to get up your non-profit up and running with this method.
Canva Creative
We leveraged a free, super easy to use design platform called Canva for all the Ad and Facebook Page images. We incorporated images of the rescued kittens and some fun cat icons along with different fonts and colors to try to engage users scrolling quickly through Facebook. Some ads converted better than others, and having a multitude of options increased the odds of the Facebook algorithm finding an ad variant winner.
Audiences
We created a few variations of Cold Audiences, targeting supporters of animal rescues, cat lovers, and interests in donations. Then, we created a Warm audience based on anyone who interacted with the Facebook ads, posts, or business page. Finally, we served them with more targeted messages around how they could make a difference by donating.
One of the cold audiences we created.
Donation Buttons
Facebook allows non-profits who are approved on the Payments platform to capture donations directly on a Facebook post using a Donate button. We added this to all of our posts, and changed the button on the Facebook Page to Donate.
Constraints & Challenges
Facebook does not have a way to track donors as a custom conversion on the platform, and since we were not driving traffic to an external website or catalog, we couldn’t use Conversions or Catalog Sales as our Campaign goal. After some evaluation, we chose the Engagement goal for the campaigns which would give us far reach via lots of social sharing and inexpensive interactions. The drawbacks were two fold:
Tracking donors to specific ad sets was difficult and inaccurate at best.
It was hard to train the Facebook algorithm to look for donors, not those who share and like posts frequently.
Additionally, in order to include a Donate button on the bottom of ads, you need to create a post on the company Facebook page or use Publishing Tools. Once you create the post, you can then hop into Ads Manager and select “Existing Post” as the ad creative to promote. This is fine, except once you choose the post to use in an ad, you will no longer be able to edit the post. If you notice an error or would like to make a change later on, you are burdened with having to recreate the post with the desired changes, select a new existing post in the ads editor, and then delete the original. I would strongly prefer to create the post in the Ad editor with the Donate button, as opposed to finalizing the post prior to creating the ad.
Giving Tuesday
Tuesday, December 3rd was Giving Tuesday. Facebook announced they would be matching donations dollar for dollar, up to $7,000,000 across all charities. In light of this, we created a one day Campaign with new creative and copy, which announced what Facebook is doing to contribute to charities and how this day was the day to donate to help Gotham City Kitties’ cause.
We increased the daily budget considerably to get the word out which translated into an increased volume of donations from cold and warm traffic.
The Results
We ran ads for approximately 30 days, grew the number of page followers 200% in 30 days, which serves as a warm audience for future campaigns.
Even though our budget was limited, we were able to engage both cold donors as well as the non-profit’s existing Facebook network to drive several thousand dollars on donations.
Combined with Facebook’s donation matches which will be published in a few week, we were able to drive a 9-18x ROAS (pending matching update).
Conclusion
While this project was small scale, both us and the client were extremely satisfied with the results. Going from nearly no footprint online and a small / non-existent donor base to a growing online following and several thousand in donations was a welcome change.
Whether or not this campaign would scale to the needs of large, multi-national charities / non-profits is a question left for another day.
We welcome the opportunity to test that out.