120. SPN: Last Minute Giving Tuesday Checklist

What value could Netflix Ads offer for fundraising, how and at what cost? Plus, jobs that took my fancy

Sep 29, 2024

A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

I plan for big days of giving with massive confidence because I’ve experienced first-hand the near-infinite platform scalability of Fundraise Up, and its (industry-leading) uptime.

Its stellar, reliable performance during events like GivingTuesday and December 31st has helped me grow digital revenue every. single. year.

Bring on Q4 🥂

Game changer? You know it is!

In this week’s SPN:

Thoughts on deploying Ads on Netflix for fundraising $$
Last minute Giving Tuesday checklist
Jobs that took my fancy this week

Let’s jump in.

Last Minute Giving Tuesday Checklist

This is going to read like an outline because that’s the easiest way for me to think through and turn it into something actionable for you. If you have any specific questions, reply here, everything comes to my Gmail inbox.

Email/SMS Strategy & Execution

Preparation is king with your email and SMS strategy. Make sure you have all your emails written, designed and ready to fire as soon as possible.

Here are the main ones to have ready, per campaign:
- Campaign announcement. Optional, but I’ve seen this do very well. It preps your donors to hold a spot in their wallet for you.
- Campaign launched email and SMS blast. This goes to everyone to notify them of the campaign, what it is, how to donate, etc.
- Mid-day campaign blasts to those who engage. You can decide if you want to send this to everyone, just openers or just clickers. And, whether you want to send an SMS as well (this can get costly). Be sure to exclude any donors and subscribers.
- Campaign ending soon or 24 hour notice email. This can be the same as the above email, but just add a big sticker saying “24 hours left”.
- Last call campaign email. Same as the above, but swap messaging for “Last call - 1 hour!” or something similar.
- Technical difficulties email template. This is a plain-text email to have handy, just in case something goes wrong.
- Shipping delays email template. Same as the above. If you’re shipping a product of any kind this is a plain-text email to have handy, just in case something goes wrong.
- Post Giving Tuesday “Thank You” email. Optional, but just a simple email thanking your donors for participating in a campaign and making it a success for everyone. Talk about how the campaign supported your programmatic efforts.
Update dynamic banners in flows to include campaign messaging, wherever applicable.
Update your new donor welcome series. Ensure you really educate donors who come in new to the file over Cyber Week.
- Typically donors who come through Giving Tuesday have a lower LTV, so educating them early is important, especially before you begin sending donation asks to them at the end of December.

Campaigns/Promos

Have you locked in what campaigns you plan to run for the holidays? Rather than getting caught in the milieu of Black Friday sales, kick off your Cyber Week with Small Business Saturday and run through the day after Giving Tuesday. It could offer you a nice corporate partnership play too - you’ve 8 weeks to get this locked in.

Promo ideas - these should be easy to understand, not complex. They must pass the “Can my Grandma understand this?” test.
- Site-wide Match. Automatically applied; clear language what “match” means in the context of the donation.
- Donation with Purchase. Once someone donates over a certain threshold, or even without a threshold, they receive a gift in their order.
- Bundle sale. Got product? For UNICEF Market I built bundles including best sellers and applied a discount higher than anything I’d run during the year.
- Multiple Bundles. Very similar to the above, but you have a few bundles that you merchandise specifically. This is great when you have a hefty number of new donors to bring in who you can offer a $5 donation to at checkout.

Website Updates

Site Banners
- Homepage - Your homepage hero banner should reflect the EOY campaign and any Match messaging.
- Announcement bar - Your site wide announcement bar should reiterate the campaign message and definitely the Match.
- Make sure it doesn’t get too thick on mobile.
- Email Capture Design - Mentioning any Match or promotion in the email pop-up yields a higher opt-in rate. Test it and see if you get the same result.
Promotions
- If you’re in PST (like me at the moment), start your campaign promotion 3 hours before it starts, to account for EST. For example, if your campaign starts on 9/30, you should enable it to go live at 9:00pm PST on 9/29 (midnight EST).
- Make sure all campaigns are active. Double/triple check everything is live when it should be, and is spelled correctly.
- When applicable, like with a site-wide Match, apply Matches automatically for the donor vs requiring a Match code.
- Don’t forget to account for all time zones. (I’ve made this error in the past hence repeating it 3 times here!)
- If you’re in EST, end all your campaigns 3 hours into the next day. For example, if your campaign ends on 9/30 at 11:59pm EST, you should keep it enabled until 2:59am on 10/1 (11:59pm PST).
Code Freeze
- Set a Pens Down Date.
  - On your website and with any apps in your tech stack, don’t push updates.
  - If you absolutely need to push an update, test it thoroughly in a staging environment and then go live with those changes.
On-Site Pixels
- Make sure your pixels are all properly firing.
- Don’t forget to check that your heatmap is properly capturing web user data for you to analyze later.
- Post Donation Survey. Be sure you have one active and updated with any Creators/Influencers/EOY Partners you want to try to understand performance from.

Paid Media + Ad Creative

Ad creative for different campaigns
- Make some creative exclusively about any Match promotion. For example, loud, bold, chunky text highlighting the % or dollar match with an image from paid media that you’ve proven converts.
- Merge your best performing donor prospecting ads with campaign messaging.
- Test including any Match promo code in your headline on Meta and Google (this could be a cool one to run an incrementality test with)
Submit Your Ads ASAP
- Especially given that we’re in an election year, you need to upload ads ASAP to ensure they get approved in time.
  - Don’t get stuck in “pending approval” or “disapproved”-land, you can make the necessary changes with time to spare now.

Organic Social Media

Post the campaign across organic social media - stories, links in bio, pinned posts, highlights.
Update any product catalogues with any Holiday prices so they reflect “promo prices” inside Meta and TikTok shops.

Affiliate/Creators/Influencers

Make sure any EOY Partners, creators and influencers have URLs that auto-apply Match codes where applicable.
- Their Match or campaign promo codes should be easy to remember if someone saw it on a billboard and had to remember it 6 hours later.
- If possible, use branded links for each affiliate/creator/influencer, for example: unicef.org/ferrari versus unbranded links that are hard to remember.
Make sure they all have updated talking points, understanding of the campaign/mission/promotion, and don’t have any questions.
Make sure you have comment moderation on lock from the creator pages or a plan on how you plan to respond to post comments.
I’d also email your campaign and all its details to publishers who have an affiliate arm (BuzzFeed Shopping, Insider Picks, etc) too. You never know. A little bump in organic publicity is often more within reach than you think.

What else would you add to this?

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

National Trust: Head of Corporate Partnerships (£55,000)

Jewish National Fund: CMO ($200,000)

World Food Program USA: Senior Associate, Digital Philanthropy ($60,000 – $65,000)

UNICEF: Communications Specialist - Media, Division of Global Communication and Advocacy, NYHQ (P3)

Age UK: Director of Network Engagement & Support (£85,272 - £94,248)

MIND: Fundraising Operations Manager, Comms (£47,043 - £52,835)

Grameen America, Inc.: Senior Product Manager, Core Digital Product ($90,000 - $105,000)

American Arbitration Association: Chief Marketing Officer

MSF USA | Doctors Without Borders: Associate Director, Audience Strategy ($124,346 - $186,518)

Human Rights Foundation: VP, MarComms ($150,000 - $175,000)

Brooklyn Org: Chief Development Officer ($180,000 - $190,000)

—> Many more jobs can be found on Pledgr.com 🎉

Explore: Build Your Tech Stack (link)

Searching for new tools or trying to trim down your tech stack? Play around in this infographic. I add to it most weeks.

How About Deploying Ads on Netflix?

In the Reading section of last week’s SPN, I shared a remarkable story about how Netflix recovered since the “great correction” of 2022 and now has an edge over Hollywood rivals.

But could Netflix Ads offer an opportunity for fundraising?

Since launching its password crackdown in May 2023, they’ve added 45M paying subscribers. Its share price has risen more than 300% from its post-correction low, and recently set new all-time highs.

For consumers, Connected TV (CTV) was supposed to be “different” - no ads, access to content on-demand, and no outrageous “pay $100 for 199 channels, only to watch one” bundles.

Then Hulu broke the promise and introduced an ad-supported tier to lower the entry price. Now we’ve CTV providers fighting for NFL, NBA, MLS sports streaming rights – all of which may only be available in real-time - with no more on-demand.

For advertisers (brands), the CTV promise was better targeting and measurement - no more Reach and Gross Rating Points (GRPs) as the only metrics. And Netflix, the pioneer of the CTV industry, introduced its ad-supported tier almost two years ago. So, does the promise still hold, and can it be used for effective fundraising?

Where Does Netflix Fit in the Donor Lifecycle?

Netflix delivers really good value in achieving the following 3 objectives where Cost Per… is less important than Conversion Rate:

Reactivation of irregular donors with high value – such as those donating occasionally at year-end with an average donation of $500+.
Their turn-out every year is unpredictable – upload an email list from the last 5 years to your programmatic platform of choice and start showing audiences long-form (30- or 60-second) assets talking about your Org’s mission and impact. Do this in October and limit the weekly frequency to 10 impressions and daily frequency to 2 impressions.
The total cost of one donor would be no more than $4 – at a conversion rate of 1%, it guarantees ROI above 1:1.
SPN Tip: All platforms used for Netflix Ads allow setting several different frequency caps simultaneously. In TheTradeDesk, frequency is set at Campaign, Ad Group, and Ad levels. A Campaign cap of 10 impressions per week and an Ad Group cap of 2 impressions per day work together. As a result, every donor sees no more than 10 impressions weekly, evenly spread across the week, instead of bundling all the 10 ads together in 5 minutes.
Conversion from several-time donors to monthly.
Use Netflix as one of several channels to serve ads to donors who have donated several times for a lifetime value of $1,000+, but have not yet signed up for monthly donations.
For this scenario, limit total frequency to 15 impressions, daily to 1 impression, and monthly to 3 – guaranteeing at least five months of exposure. For the first month, set up an A/B test, serving Netflix ads only to a small (~10%) portion of the overall audience and look at Conversion Rate lift between the two groups as the main success factor.
Advancement to Mid-Level donors.
For donors with a Lifetime Value of >$5,000, set up an ongoing campaign and limit frequency to 36 impressions per year, 3 per month, and 1 per day. For an annual cost of a mere $1 per donor touched, this will be a worthy addition to your advancement campaigns.

SPN Tip: In Q4 this year CTV as a whole (Netflix in particular) will be hit harder than other mediums by the influx of Political advertising spend. Launch tactic #1 “Reactivation of irregular donors with high value” in October, but delay testing the other two tactics until after the election.

What’s the Audience and the Cost?

Most of Netflix’s ad-supported viewers are GenZ’ers. Around 69% of them watch Netflix, which is on par with TikTok (71%) and lower than YouTube (89%). When Netflix first introduced their Ad-Supported tier, it sold for a CPM of $60. Today, it’s more like $25 for a 15-second asset and $30 for a 30-second one.

It’s still significantly higher than TikTok (~$10) and YouTube (~$15). One argument “for” Netflix is the larger screen size and higher impact of each creative served. But Amazon Prime Video is still lower at ~$20 CPM - offering an ad-supported reach of ~200M people, compared to Netflix’s 40M.

SPN Tip: Netflix has a large share of the GenZ audience but it’s too price-prohibitive to prospect this or any other segment. Instead, I’d focus on only using Netflix to serve proven audiences and use TikTok to experiment with younger demographics.

How Do You Buy Inventory?

While Netflix build their in-house advertising technology platform (rumored to be ready in 2025) access is via four major programmatic platforms: TheTradeDesk, Google’s Display & Video 360, Xandr, and Magnite.

Netflix’s targeting options are extremely limited - Age, Gender, Location (by state only), Genre, and place in the show. Some unique options are:

Daily Top10 – guarantee to place ads only on the daily top 10 shows
First Impression – guarantee to place the ad first in somebody’s viewing session for the day
“Binge ad format” – sponsor the “4^th episode in a row to be shown without ads

Interesting though they are the above targeting options are useless for reaching a specific audience and are only helpful to guarantee a particular impression context. Instead, use any platform you - or your agency - already use for other campaigns. That way, you can manage the frequency of Netflix Ads as part of your broader strategy and leverage the same audiences.

SPN Tip: “Private auction” is a different buy type from classic Real-Time Bidding, otherwise called “open auction.” Deals available on any of the four platforms will be the same, and you’ll pay a lower tech fee than for open auction buys.

What Creative Should Be Used?

Large-screen, long-format video creative becomes expensive very fast. The traditional TV route is to onboard a full-scope creative agency to manage the entire filming process. Opportunities for cost savings are limited - AI tools are not yet there to create good-looking videos.

Dropping this kind of money might be worth it for a custom sponsorship package, but it’s not worth the risk for an initial test of the platform. To isolate the impact, use the exact same creative you are already using on YouTube and compare conversion rates.

SPN Tip: Add a QR code to the creative, leading to a custom-designed landing page referencing the video ad. This simplifies attribution and brings donors straight into the donation funnel, avoiding the need for a branded search.