135. SPN: Donor Lifecycle Planning x 12 Months
Plus, Creative is a wayyy bigger $$ multiplier than audience targeting
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In this week’s SPN →
Great campaign idea and execution example from Denmark
Connecting donor lifecycle planning and donor experience
Being ruthless about audience exclusions
Creative is a (12x) bigger multiplier on $$ than Audience Targeting
and, plenty of Jobs & Opps that took my fancy this week.
Let’s jump in!
Managing to Revenue Outcomes
A decades-old obsession with audience targeting and media tonnage has led to a few not-so-great outcomes.
Three come to mind:
Supporter distrust
Growing legislation across the media landscape
Diminishing returns from paid media
Check out this chart I came across on WARC. It’s not a sector-specific chart but given the fact that we too are targeting consumers, it felt relevant to share.
It shows that Creative Quality has a 12x multiplier effect on profitability versus 1x for Audience Targeting.
Look at where “Target audiences” sits! Managing audiences is still going to be necessary but - on the multiplier scale - it’s certainly not sufficient.
There’s a very clear opportunity for marketing and fund raising leaders here to take real accountability of Ad Creative in managing to revenue outcomes and positive returns. Not only media metrics.
→ Creative quality (excellence) is what’s going to drive Supporter engagement and ultimately revenue, especially in today’s AI-driven landscape.
The other consideration that jumped out from this chart was multimedia and multichannel. Show up in more places people are searching, not just where you can serve people content (like Meta ads).
We get so caught up in having a functional website, running good ads, having an active social media presence and producing relevant email flows... but Supporters won’t donate (at least repeatedly) unless they see proof that your programs actually work in the places they’re hanging out. Those places are likely TikTok search, Google, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter/X. It’s the balance of this mix you need to test.
Ultimately it’s consistent Creative Quality across channels that builds a cohesive brand presence. This type of approach to brand-building - iterative, intentional, full funnel - will really pay off when you get to mid-November later this year and turn the heat up on your end of year campaign.
Hacking the Cloakroom
Talking about Creative Quality, I haven’t managed to shake just how much I loved the concept and execution of this youth mental health campaign in Denmark.
Insight 1 - younger people go to bars and clubs, and they take photos of their coat check tickets because they know they’ll misplace it by the end of the night.
Insight 2 - Across the globe, there’s been a sharp rise in anxiety and depression among young people. In Denmark, up to 25% of young people reported increasing levels of pressure, loneliness and anxiety.
Action → Recognizing the need for support systems, Danish children’s charity Børns Vilkår launched a campaign to make resources more accessible to young people.
They created more than 250,000 custom coat-check tickets featuring a QR code
The code linked directly to Hørt, Børns Vilkår’s 24/7 confidential counseling line
Coat-check tickets were distributed to more than 100 nightclubs, concert venues and schools/colleges across Denmark
Result - According to Publicis Denmark, the campaign generated over 500,000 impressions and 10,000 engagements on social media.
A lot of the genius in this is in leveraging an audience’s known behavior, and ensuring Børns Vilkår’s details are saved in camera rolls and browser histories. I love how it cuts through any noise and engages their target audience right where they’re at. Talk about a relevant placement! And a coat-check ticket is one helluva low-cost medium and yet as a communication tool it’s absolutely gold.
Jobs & Opps 🛠️
UNICEF UK: Marketing Cloud Project Manager (£53,000)
Save the Children US: Senior Director, Philanthropy Comms ($88,400 - $121,600)
UNDP: Communications Lead, Digital Transformation
UNHCR: PPH Officer (Islamic Philanthropy)
SickKids Foundation: Manager, Development Operations ($81,251 – $116,803)
World Food Programme: Optimization Consultant (Analytics & Platform)
The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD): Director of Philanthropy ($90,000 - $115,000)
National Catholic Reporter: Chief Advancement Officer ($130,000 - $150,000)
National Trust: Data & Performance Analyst (£36,621)
Back to the Bible: Chief Advancement Officer
National Black Theatre: Development Director ($125,000 - $150,000)
Lamda Legal: National Director, Individual Philanthropy ($160,000 - $180,000)
→ More jobs updated daily to SPN’s sister website: www.pledgr.com
Donor Lifecycle Planning
In SPN #130, I discussed the need for an omnichannel Donor Lifecycle that’s at least 12 months long. More than a handful of you replied with a similar question - did I have any tactics that can fill that amount of time and space - it’s a longer lifecycle than we’re used to dealing with?
Yes! Here’s 4 and how I ensure it generates incremental revenue for the Org ->
Don’t Limit “Donor Experience” to “Paid and Organic Media”
Go Full Dolby Atmos Mode
Leverage External Momentum
Be Ruthless about Audience Exclusions
1. Don’t Limit “Donor Experience” to “Paid and Organic Media.”
Digital channels – Paid Search, Paid Social, Display, and Video - might always be the backbone of your funnel but if your donor experience strategy ends there, you’re missing large swaths of opportunities.
Multimedia (I’m trying not to write “webinar”!) is an excellent fund raising tool to break the fourth wall for existing donors that can also serve as a creative asset – and a landing page – for new donor acquisition.
Don’t do a classic speak-to-the-screen-and-show-slides webinar from 1995 – think of IG livestream-type content instead. Or Loom.
Test it by limiting it to 5 minutes. 15 if it’s a conversation between two people. You’re operating in an influencer-driven economy fueled by social media. People draw people.
Some content ideas:
Educational multimedia with boots-on-the-ground staff. Think Masterclass-type videos, where staff members do a brief educational session on the issue your Org addresses. No fundraising – only what is happening, why it is essential, and what your Org is doing to address it.
Quarterly town hall with your CEO/ED or broader leadership team, taking questions from select donors.
“Donor Spotlight” session, inviting select donors to speak in a pre-defined, blitz-interview format with no more than 5-7 questions repeating every time.
Feature a Corp Partner and their “why”.
For each of the above types of content:
Create a section on your Org’s website to host all multimedia in one place.
Don’t publish it on the above page. Host it on YouTube (and live stream when possible) and embed the YouTube player onto your website.
Cut each piece of multimedia into several shorter clips and publish those on your social media platforms.
Test whatever piece of multimedia as a landing page in your paid search campaigns and emails to existing donors and prospects.
Use short social media clips as “promoted post” creative assets.
2. Go Full Dolby Atmos Mode
Deploy “consistent, surround sound” around a donor. Seed and amplify your messaging.
3-5 days before any new asset drops, use Paid Social and Display to tease it with a countdown creative and a “leave-your-email” call to action. Paid Social networks all have built-in lead gen functionality, which is useless in most scenarios but very helpful for this one.
Accompany any piece of YouTube/multimedia with a blast of organic social posting across the platforms. Meta’s Threads feels underrated and the numbers continue to grow.
The day after it airs, send out an email and SMS with an “if you missed it” message and a link to an on-demand recording.
Once a quarter, run a “forum ads” campaign on Reddit and Quora, leading to the on-demand page across all subreddits categorically aligned with your Org’s cause.
If your Org holds offline events – fundraising gala dinners or walks/bike rides alike – livestream them on social media and follow the same pre-/post activities above, even if real-time viewership is at 0. These make for significant creative assets after the fact.
The wider the channel net, the more times supporters will see your Org when not proactively looking, contributing to that surround sound feeling.
Political candidates use this tactic all the time, accompanying their offline rallies with omnipresent digital campaigns and a real-time wave of tweets (X-s?) restating key statements as their candidate speaks from the podium. Those campaign strategists know a thing or two about quickly grabbing a 51% market share!
3. Leverage External Momentum
Launch a simple Paid Social media and Display campaign to stay informed immediately after an emergency event or a new policy release that affects your Org’s cause.
To operationalize this, create a playbook containing a few pre-approved images, headlines, and body text options that could be used for 90% of use cases.
At UNICEF, this playbook included not only necessary assets for hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes but also pre-defined Google Ads and Facebook campaigns to the point where it took me, my team, or our agency to plug in the name of a new emergency into the feed and press “start” to go live. We were live within max 3 hours of every Emergency, allowing the Org to maximize revenue potential ahead of everybody else.
SPN Tip: This playbook doesn’t have to be just tapped for Emergency fund raising. Include non-donation CTAs in it too, leading to the “Our Programs” page on the website for instance. And use a broader range of events to stay in the daily context of your donors - non-ambassador celebrity-types speaking up on the issue your Org works on and going viral.
4. Be Ruthless about Audience Exclusions
Lengthy, omnichannel donor experience is expensive. It’s the right thing to do in the context of one donor, but it will immediately strain the Org’s budget if launched for every donor.
Last-Touch attribution is meant to cut out touchpoints and channels from the mix while keeping the audience broad. To increase conversion rate and revenue, flip the algorithm and be extremely ruthless about excluding non-converting audiences while increasing the number of touchpoints and channels.
The more straightforward approach is to run audience reports at least weekly across each platform your organization uses and add exclusions to all campaigns. Use In-Market and Affinity audiences in Google tools and Category and Look-a-Likes in Meta. Exclude the segments contributing 10% of impressions with the lowest engagement metrics (not CPA or RoAS, but website visits and page depth).
The more advanced way is to work with your in-house team or an agency to develop an “audience similarity” score – a measure of how much every new-to-file donor is similar to your Org’s “best” donors, ranging from 0% to 100%. It can be recreated using predictive functions of GA4, but those tend to be inaccurate, and I don’t recommend relying on them.
Developed similarity scores can be later used as a dimension for building look-alike audiences, including prospects similar to the ones above a specific score and excluding everybody else. The exact cut-off number should be tested. 80% is my default starting point.
Start with the first option and introduce “Budget per Prospect” and “Revenue per Donor” metrics to your reports.
Budget per prospect is the total spend divided by most advertising platforms' “unique reach” metric.
Revenue per donor is effectively the lifetime value – pull it from the CRM and update it once a month. Language matters – calling it revenue per donor initiates the right behavior across the Org.
By following one of the two steps above, either the more straightforward or more advanced option, you’ll effectively reduce the audience size, increasing the budget per prospect. AND, the revenue per donor will subsequently start growing as well!
The golden ratio you’re looking for is 0.3:1 in the first month of running a channel, 1:1 in the fourth month, and 2:1 by month 12, as I explained in SPN #130. This measurement approach encourages everybody to understand the investment in longer, omnichannel donor journeys and see those as a way to increase the ROI. The large payoff in return for patience and planning is rather helpful too!
OK, that’s all for today.
I hope you’ve found one thing in today’s SPN that you can make your own and run with.
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